


all good things

by Fluffifullness



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Amputation, Angst, Apocalypse, Coming Out, F/M, Fix-It, Haircuts, Head Injury, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Past Abuse, Post-Canon, Whump, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:07:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 67,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21777280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluffifullness/pseuds/Fluffifullness
Summary: If the world ever ended, how would it happen?Eddie still remembers going through a brief phase in his junior year of college where he read dozens of newspaper and magazine articles about that. One second, he was worrying about Ebola or cholera or, hell, maybe it was literally the bubonic plague, and the next, he was giving serious thought to the possibility of apocalypse-by-pandemic. Which of course begged the question – hey, what else could end the world?The answer, then and now, is “a lot of things.”(A post-IT Chapter 2apocalypse fic.)
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 79
Kudos: 200





	1. Stargazing

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'd like to start this off with a few notes - just to offer a good idea of what you can expect of this fic!
> 
> First - of course I'll endeavor to explain the circumstances of the apocalypse I've decided to go with in the text itself, but if Pennywise Spider Babies seems extremely left field and you're just wondering, _what the fuck?_ \- I got it from the book, which I have not read but know a fair bit about thanks to my roommate. This fic will be solidly post-2019 movie canon (aside from casually unkilling Stan and Eddie), but Pennywise babies aside, I'll also lift a few little things I know of from book canon.
> 
> Second - my goal is to make this a nice ensemble fic for the entire Losers Club, hence the multi-ship tags! I am absolutely going to play favorites, but I still aim to give everyone POV bits even if I do wind up devoting marginally more time to Richie/Eddie. I wouldn't have tagged Bike, for example, if I wasn't gonna write it as more than a side pairing - as you're about to see!
> 
> And third - I have Things Planned here, but not a complete beginning-to-end plan like I had for my ghost fic! I've never done an apocalypse fic and mostly just wanted to try it because I think it'll be fun, so to an extent I'm going to let this fic decide what it wants to be. :)
> 
> On that note: This is an end-of-the-world story, so I can't guarantee no harm will befall anyone (perhaps I can even guarantee... that it will) BUT I _can_ guarantee that no one is going to die.

If the world ever ended, how would it happen?

Eddie still remembers going through a brief phase in his junior year of college where he read dozens of newspaper and magazine articles about that. One second, he was worrying about Ebola or cholera or, hell, maybe it was literally the bubonic plague, and the next, he was giving serious thought to the possibility of apocalypse-by-pandemic. Which of course begged the question – hey, what else could end the world?

The answer, then and now, is “a lot of things.”

“Because why pick one? Why pick just  _ one fucking thing?”  _ Eddie snaps, throwing his hands up at the sky and nearly whacking Ben in the head with his torque wrench in the process. His feet still hurt from all the walking-slash-running they did  _ yesterday _ , and the sun reflecting up off the asphalt of this particular stretch of road isn’t doing anything for the sweat dripping down Eddie’s back. It’s making him extra jumpy, imagining he’s feeling the tiny, hairy legs of little spiders running across his skin.

As if on cue, Ben puts some extra distance between himself and Eddie and says, “Because they’re babies?”

“They were babies before they hatched,” Mike reminds them. He sounds almost patient, but his voice is still missing the hint of amusement that would have separated it from the quietly despondent mood he seems to have fully settled into at this point.

“Yeah, now they’re like overenthusiastic toddlers making macaroni art for the fridge,” Richie says with a languorous stretch half-disguised as a shrug. Speaking around the tail end of a yawn, he adds, “Messy.”

“Except the macaroni is humanity and we killed the proud parent of hundreds,” Eddie mutters. “‘Messy.’”

“At least we managed that,” Bev says. “I think I’m better off not knowing what Pennywise hanging the mess up with magnets would’ve looked like.”

Richie casts a not-so-surreptitious glance in Mike’s direction. He still hasn’t cracked the genuine grin Richie’s spent half the morning angling for, but then, none of them have. Even Richie’s wide, jokey smiles have all been pretty forced, but Eddie doesn’t begrudge him his own methods of coping. It’s been a rough week, and Eddie can’t be the only one who’d rather not think too hard about the writing on the wall.

“Probably use those alphabet magnets,” Richie says. “Or, you know, clowns. You guys think they’ll grow up to be”—?

“Beep beep, Richie,” Stan interrupts with a halfhearted glare. He’s quick to turn that glare back on his phone, which is still plugged in to one of even-Eddie-doesn’t-know  _ how  _ many portable chargers he has stuffed into his extra-large camping backpack. He still hasn’t bothered to cut the price tags off of it; there’s probably nothing to be done about the plastic security tag either way, not that it matters.

“Any l-l-luck with that?” Bill asks, nodding at the phone.

“Not out here,” Stan sighs in obvious frustration. Bev shoots him a sympathetic look to echo the one Eddie attempts; Derry is one thing, but any given tree-lined country road in Maine? The alien spider-clown babies probably didn’t have to lift a single spindly leg to cut off cell service out here. The natural isolation of deep, dark woods and scarcely-traveled roads. It’s as much a curse as it is a blessing.

As they come up on a tight curve in the road, Eddie digs in the pocket of his jeans and pulls out his map. He really regrets not snapping up a spare copy when he had the chance; this one’s already looking concerningly worn, as often as he unfolds it to double and triple and quadruple check every suggestion he makes.

He doesn’t even really  _ need  _ to; signs and landmarks have been relatively few and far between today, their next turn-off is miles – and hopefully a thievable car – away, and Eddie’s sense of direction is plenty good on its own.

He clears his throat to get everyone’s attention. “I think we can make it to this town before dark,” he says, pointing.

Richie leans over his shoulder to look. “In real people distances, how far is that from us?”

“I don’t have an exact number…”

Richie shrugs. “So guess.”

“Most of the day, alright? Twenty miles, maybe a little more.”

Ben sucks in a breath. “That’s pretty far.”

“Yeah, it’s most of the day,” Eddie grumps.

Richie’s breath stops tickling the back of Eddie’s neck, but no sooner has he let Eddie drift a little further ahead of him than he bounds up to walk alongside him. Eddie lowers the map to watch him out of the corner of his eye.

“That’s still good news, right? Stan can get an update on where Patty is, or better yet we just run into her coming down from Portland. And Eds”—

“Doesn’t have a working phone, remember?”

“Fine, offer to lend you mine rescinded,” Richie says.

“Yours has been dead for at  _ least  _ a day and we both know it,” Eddie huffs. Richie doesn’t have a response for that except to grumble something about borrowing one of Stan’s pilfered chargers; Eddie doesn’t bother with a rejoinder, and Richie, to his credit, takes his cue to drop the subject without putting up a fight.

The thing is, even if Eddie hadn’t dropped his stupid phone in all the confusion – even if he could somehow still get a call from Myra right this second, he doesn’t think he’d want to answer it. He’s tried rationalizing _that_ to himself all kinds of ways, but at the end of the day he just feels awful about it. He should be worried about Myra, or at least worried that she’s worried about him. He’s tried and almost succeeded at convincing himself that he is _,_ but he’s not like Stan. He can’t see himself insisting on a long trek halfway across the state of Maine just to reunite with his wife.

Stan, on the other hand, is so single-mindedly focused on that goal that he doesn’t even acknowledge Richie’s optimistic remark beyond a slight nod of his head. His eyes stay glued to the signal bars in the top corner of his phone. Eddie’s a little impressed that he hasn’t tripped once, and that he can stand not to repeatedly scan the edges of the forest for signs of danger.

No one says much else until Bill suggests that they break for a quick meal and a sorely-needed rest. According to Eddie’s watch, they only actually spend about thirty minutes sitting in the grass by the side of the road, but every second of it feels slow and heavy with the threat of danger. Eddie keeps the wrench within easy reach to his right, while to his left Richie sits close and keeps up a steady rhythm of murmured jokes and quiet chewing.

Eddie’s eyes linger on the hand Richie rests on top of his baseball bat. He looks anything but prepared to fend off any sudden attacks – all dark undereye circles and droopy, tired shoulders, probably no thanks to his turn as lookout last night – but that does nothing to detract from the odd sense of security that settles over Eddie, watching Richie rhythmically drumming his fingers against the wood while an easy smile settles over his face.

It might be the first genuine one Eddie’s seen from him today.

-*-

“M-M-Mike. Mikey.”

Mike blinks away the scattered images that cling like wet paper to the insides of his eyelids. He can almost see afterimages suspended in the dark in front of him – deep, dark water, brittle, yellowed papers, bloodied knuckles, bulging sacs of eggs splitting open, vomiting thick, crawling streams of hungry eldritch horrors – but there is also Bill, Big Bill with one hand planted firmly on Mike’s sweat-soaked shoulder and the other keeping himself balanced as he kneels beside Mike’s sleeping bag.

“Bill. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Mike whispers, maybe too hollowly to suffice for a genuine apology.

“I w-wasn’t sleeping, r-r-remember?” Bill says, nodding toward the spot he’d staked out as a sort of unofficial lookout post when he volunteered to take the first watch.

“Right… So, uh, my turn?” Mike guesses, already loosening the zipper on the side of the bag and bracing himself for the chill of the night air.

“No, n-not yet,” Bill says, almost too loud. He uses the hand he’d been propping himself up with to nudge Mike back, nearly causing himself to topple over in the process. “It’s only b-been a few hours. You were…”

“Having a nightmare,” Mike fills in, scrubbing a hand down his face and sitting up anyway.

Bill doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to; Mike can just barely make out his expression by the light of the moon, but even if he couldn’t, he’d know.

“Thanks for waking me,” he says, thinking better of telling any obvious lies. He isn’t fine, and they both know it.

They also both know how important it is to get as much sleep as they can before they have to continue on their way tomorrow, which is why Mike is mildly surprised when Bill asks if he wants to sit up with him for a while – “i-if you want to, s-so we could talk.”

_ Take both our minds off all of this, _ he doesn’t say, but Mike has a feeling the exclusion is intentional. Even  _ Richie’s  _ noticed his deepening malaise, if his habitual cycle of wisecracks followed by furtive glances in Mike’s direction have been anything to go by. Of course Bill wouldn’t have missed it, and of course Bill would be the first to stop carefully avoiding the subject.

“Yeah, okay,” Mike agrees, because it’s Bill, and because he’s missed him. Because he’s missed having talks – even hard ones – and that’s the closest thing to a silver lining he’s seen in days.

He casts a look around at the others as he stands and stretches some of the ache from his limbs.

Ben and Bev are the only ones who look genuinely comfortable. It probably helps that they’ve got an extra sleeping bag to share, but Mike thinks it has more to do with being wrapped up in each other’s arms. Meanwhile, Eddie’s already migrated so close to Richie – or maybe vice versa, as much as Richie seems to toss and turn at night – that he could easily reach out and touch his back if he were awake to notice his change of position.

_ And _ if he didn’t sleep with his arms and head all neatly zipped into a hooded sleeping bag. Richie still hasn’t gotten tired of teasing him for sleeping like a mummy, but he never says a word about how close they are every morning when they wake up. Closer every time.

Stan, on the other hand, looks no more restful than Mike must have, curled up all alone. His brow is furrowed, and his phone is clenched so tightly in his hand that Mike worries it’ll break. He knows Stan has its volume turned up as high as it will go, and he’s seen him startle awake and immediately check the screen enough times to guess that he hears it ringing in his dreams.

“Everyone’s fine,” Bill murmurs, catching Mike by the wrist and following the line of his gaze.

“No, they aren’t,” Mike sighs. That’s another thing they both know, like it or not. They’re all alive, but even that isn’t a guarantee anymore, and the only way “fine” can exist alongside the end of the world is in the lyrics of an R.E.M. song.

He should’ve—

Bill gives his wrist a light tug, and Mike lets himself be guided back a short distance to Bill’s spot. Close enough to have a good view of the entire group, and far enough that they should be able to avoid waking the others with the sounds of their voices. Eddie may have underestimated the distance they would have had to travel today to make it as far as another town, but at least they still managed to break free of the heaviest parts of the forest; from here, back-to-back by wordless agreement, the two of them can see far enough in either direction that they’d have ample time to alert the others if anything or anyone broke through the surrounding treeline. 

“Look,” Bill says, pointing. 

Mike tenses so abruptly that Bill lowers his hand and turns to look at him. They both scan the other’s field of vision for swaying, lurching figures, semi-human or otherwise, and only then does Mike follow the line of Bill’s finger  _ up _ .

At first he expects there to be some sign of danger there, too – something worse than the common bats that seem to bother Eddie so much, like rising smoke or another of the half-formed, twisted shapes those  _ things  _ seem to enjoy trying on.

He tries to shoot Bill a confused look when he fails to find anything of the sort, but Bill hardly seems to notice. He’s short enough to use Mike as a headrest without having to sacrifice his upright posture – all this time, and he’s hardly grown at all. Hardly changed. His calm, like his alarm, is just as contagious as it was when they were kids.

“The stars,” he says, simply. “They never l-look like this back in L.A.”

Mike blinks back up at the sky. Without Bill’s steady weight there to ground him, he thinks the incredible vastness of it would be dizzying. It seems like it could go on forever, past the trees that interrupt it like so many jagged teeth, past the ground beneath them, a perfect sphere littered with thousands upon thousands of tiny lights. 

It’s been a long time, Mike thinks, and because he isn’t lying, he doesn’t pretend that the sight is any more familiar to him than it is to Bill.

“They’re beautiful,” he says. He does  _ not _ say that the L.A. sky might not be so different, sooner or later. No people, no light – just stars. It sounds a lot more idyllic if you put it like that. If you don’t think about why, or how, or who could’ve stopped it.

Should’ve known—

“This isn’t on you, Mikey,” Bill says to the soft white glow burning unfathomably far above them. “This thing – th-these  _ things,  _ they came from out there somewhere. They should have never been our problem. And you – you did more than any of us. You couldn’t have known It had”—

“That It could reproduce?” That being the so-called “Eater of Worlds” might mean a little more than cursing a single New England town for millions of years? 

Bill doesn’t flinch in the slightest. His answer comes with the easy, single-minded certainty he’s always been so capable of. 

“It didn’t want you to know. B-but even if you had?”

Mike answers with silence, but now it’s the silence of an open door. Listening, waiting.

“Saving the whole damn world isn’t a one-man job,” Bill says. “Even s-saving an entire town isn’t. It’s too much responsibility to put on you, or – or any of us.”

“But all the research I did – all the waiting, and planning”—

“Helped us all survive killing It in the f-first place,” Bill reminds him. “And n-now it’s  _ everyone’s  _ job to make sure we  _ keep _ surviving. You get t-to share it, Mikey.”

Mike wipes at the tears that have started to roll down his cheeks. Bill doesn’t say anything else, but he does reach back to take Mike’s hand in his. Maybe it’s just the after-dark chill in the air, but his skin feels warm enough against Mike’s that he can imagine it driving out all the worst of his regrets. He feels… lighter, even if just a little.

“I’ll do my best,” he promises. “Thanks, Bill.”

“Hey, that’s what losers are for, right?”

-*-

There’s one thing Richie can say for the probable, ongoing end of the world, and that’s that it just about maxes out his ability to worry about the little things. He can’t imagine too many other scenarios in which he could wake up curled against Eddie – or as much against Eddie as two sleeping bags of separation will allow – and not feel the need to immediately crack some stupid joke about it.

He opens his eyes to the sight of _Eddie’s_ eyes practically boring a hole into him, and while Richie’s too sleep-dazed to actually read that expression, it’s enough that he doesn’t look repulsed, or irritated, or even uncomfortable – which is quite a feat, because Richie abso-fucking-lutely _is_ uncomfortable, several nights into sleeping on the cold, hard ground. 

Eddie studies him long enough for Richie to realize that he’s somehow managed to drape his own sleeping bag-covered legs across Eddie’s. He moves them with an apologetic grunt and sits up.

He’s somehow stiffer and achier than when he first fell asleep, but at least he slept through the night this time; the grassy field around them is just beginning to light up with the first gray notes of dawn, and Stan’s already finished packing away his own sleeping bag. He looks half-dead from exhaustion, but he looks determined, too, and Richie wants to believe that’s a good thing. That he’s holding on to hope.

“Sleep well?” Eddie asks, grimacing a little as the cool morning air hits him. Richie tosses him a spare jacket, which Eddie takes with a surprised little smile.

“No way. I’m giving this place a terrible review on Yelp,” Richie announces. “But on the bright side – no zombies, no wannabe murderers. So I guess they earned two stars, anyway. Maybe even two and a half. What do you think?”

Eddie shudders. “Ugh. Don’t fucking jinx it.”

“What, the murderers?” Richie says. “I think camping in the woods already”—

“No, asshole, zombies,” Eddie retorts with an exasperated roll of his eyes. He starts folding his sleeping bag back up with a little more force than is strictly necessary. “Monsters, fine. People going off the fucking rails, fine”—

_ “‘Fine?’”  _ Richie echoes.

—“but a highly contagious plague that kills you  _ and  _ makes you a fucking monster”—

“Isn’t real?” Stan says.

“Could be real for all we know!” Eddie huffs, throwing his hands up to emphasize the point he’s trying to make. “I’m just saying, it better not be!”

“I think zombies would’ve been enough by themselves,” Ben offers, startling Richie enough that he turns to see both him and Bev casting bleary glances in their direction. “Without any of the extra things.”

“…I guess that’s true,” Eddie sighs, looking slightly mollified.

“I wouldn’t give them any ideas, though,” Bev murmurs. She’s already got her gun in her hands, which would be a lot more terrifying if it weren’t for how confidently she holds it. Richie can hardly blame her for wanting to make sure her weapon is still right where it should be so soon after waking up; the longer they go without any confrontations, the more likely one seems to happen.

But  _ that  _ actually does feel a little like jinxing it.

Richie finally manages to get his sleeping bag stuffed back into its too-small bag and then watches as Mike and Bill start to stir a few feet away. He’d feel bad for semi-accidentally waking everyone if it weren’t for how strained Stan looks. Just seeing the drawn look on his face is enough to make Richie’s own chest tighten in sympathy; he doubts he’d be doing any better if Eddie weren’t here with him right now.

So that’s two things, he guesses, two silver linings. They boil down to one, anyway, and that’s Eddie.

Eddie, who forgets his fear of hypothetical flesh-eating corpses as soon as it’s time to get them back on their way to the next town. Eddie, who falls back to where Richie starts to lag behind the rest of the group and then makes everyone wait while he deftly bandages the blister that’s formed on Richie’s heel. Eddie, who trades bites of a breakfast granola bar for sips of bottled water like the entire exchange is some kind of argument he and Richie are having.  _ You’re not eating enough for this much walking, Richie, this is basic fucking wilderness survival. _

Eddie, who visibly oscillates between hiding behind Richie and leaping in front of him when a car appears from around a bend in the road and then slows to a gradual stop several yards ahead of them.

Eddie, who settles on the former, finally, but still keeps one hand closed like a vice around Richie’s wrist while the other holds his wrench-that-doesn’t-look-like-a-wrench like a shield in front of him.

Richie doesn’t even hesitate to put himself between Eddie and whatever the hell watches them through dark-tinted windows, unmoving. Bill and Mike creep up to stand beside him, and Richie hears the faint click of Beverly’s gun cocking somewhere to his right.

The driver’s door swings open, fast as a bird spreading its wings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so it begins! I'm really experimenting with this one, so consider letting me know if something really does/doesn't work! Constructive criticism is perfectly welcome if you happen to have any!


	2. The Man in Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note that I've added a graphic violence warning starting with this chapter! Your mileage may vary, but there's a somewhat gruesome bit in this chapter (and more to follow down the road), and I _tried_ to make it creepy.

To Stanley, it’s like watching the world through a pair of binoculars – like he’s standing a mile away, and if he turns his head just slightly he’ll completely lose track of what’s happening in front of him. Like there’s a layer of glass between him and the others, warping them just enough to strain the sense of security he gets from being around them.

He’d thought that feeling was finally gone, buried with Its desiccated remains beneath the rubble of a house that probably should have collapsed under its own weight decades ago. For two blissfully ignorant days, it  _ was  _ gone, and things made  _ sense _ . Summer was just summer, and Derry was just a small town in Maine – the kind of town you could invite your wife to visit.

Then the flood, and the Things in the water.

He won’t be able to run, he thinks distantly. If something is as wrong here as it was in Derry, he’ll be left behind, to be twisted into something not him or else killed, and as a preference begins to form in his mind, two shoes hit asphalt one after another. A man’s voice cuts through the ringing in Stan’s ears. 

“You folks look like you could use a lift.”

“Doesn’t look like we’re headed in the same direction,” Ben says carefully. 

The car door swings shut with a disorienting slam. Stan’s frayed nerves read it as a blow, a shot fired, and by the time he realizes he’s flinching, he’s already taken a step back.

“Oh, I think we are,” the man says. He’s wearing a simple two piece suit, red tie, clean-shaven, tidy hair. Tidier than any of them, road-worn and dirty and exhausted as they are. The man’s car purrs and purrs behind him as he takes several slow steps forward, raised hands framing the neighborly smile that settles over his features.

“I’d feel terrible just leaving you all out here, middle of nowhere,” he says. “It’ll be a little tight, but it sure beats walking.”

“No thanks, man,” Richie says, aloof but with an edge that betrays more than a hint of suspicion. 

“I insist.” 

The man’s smile widens, like he’s laughing at a secret joke, and he steps back toward his car. 

He gets almost as far as the driver’s-side door before Beverly points her gun at him and tells him not to move. He pauses, but his hesitation is fleeting. It’s enough for him to take in the sight of her, pushing past Richie and Bill with her jaw set in a determined line, and then he continues on like he doesn’t believe she’ll actually shoot.

His mistake, then. Stan’s hands fly up to his ears, but they’re already ringing with the gunfire crack. His eyes slam shut reflexively, and in that moment of orange-black darkness he sees Patty beaming up at him from their kitchen counter – her preferred workspace, always, never the old mahogany desk that’s stuffed with years of old syllabi and lesson plans.

The smell of dinner cooking on the stove, and her favorite perfume.

When he opens his eyes, the man is screaming open-mouthed. Stan assumes it’s a cry of pain until his hearing recovers enough to make it clear that there’s no emotion in the sound. No rage or joy or pain – just noise.

“Did you hit him?” he hears himself ask, shakily. 

“No,” Bev hisses, and fires again as the man lurches forward with something clutched in his hands that Stan is pretty sure wasn’t there before. His eyes are dead; he doesn’t even seem to register the impact that jerks his whole left shoulder back. Stan isn’t the only one who flinches, but the man doesn’t stop lurching forward for even a fraction of a second. He gets close enough that Stan imagines he can feel the heat of his breath on his face, and he can finally see that the man’s red tie isn’t a tie at all, but a wet smear of blood, the lower half of a trail that’s been carefully wiped clean from the man’s chin and throat. His black jacket glistens like it’s been dunked in oil. Stanley’s breath hitches, and he takes another involuntary step back.

The man extends the thing in his hand toward Beverly, fast but too clumsy to actually make contact with her. Stanley can’t tell what the thing is – another wet, red smear, dripping down along the lines of the man’s knuckles – but the other Losers must be able to, because Richie moves at the same time as Mike, moments ahead of Bill, and the man topples with the resounding  _ crack-crack  _ of two baseball bats colliding with flesh and bone. The thing in his hand clinks onto the road and rolls a short distance away, leaving a thready trail of blood in its wake.

The sound – the sounds, in rapid succession – are followed by several startled exclamations – from Ben and Eddie and Stan himself, and then from Richie, who staggers back into Eddie with a harsh, choked-off gag. 

“Are you okay?” Eddie gasps, white-knuckling Richie’s wrist – did he let go just to grab it again? – and now also dropping his own weapon to look him over for signs of injury. Richie’s bat clatters to the ground shortly after, but Mike keeps a harsh grip on his until Bill moves in to pull him into a hug. Mike tries to reciprocate without letting go of the makeshift weapon, and it’s only when he seems to realize he’s liable to hit Bill with it that he finally lets it fall.

“Never better,” Richie says in the meantime. His face has taken on an ashen hue; Stan’s surprised that Eddie doesn’t move out of the way to avoid any impending vomit.

His attention snaps back to the stranger laid out on the ground in front of them, and then to the stranger’s car, still idling away a few yards back. The windows are too dark for Stan to make out any movement inside, but that doesn’t mean there is none.

“Uh, guys,” Stan says, gesturing at the vehicle. He doesn’t have to actually say it to convey the question,  _ What if he isn’t alone, either? _

Bill gives Mike one last meaningful look before he lets go. He still leaves one hand to linger against Mike’s forearm. “We n-need to check it,” he agrees. “And maybe use it.”

“Take a joyride in  _ this  _ guy’s car?” Richie repeats, somehow managing to look  _ more  _ aghast than he already had. Eddie grimaces in agreement beside him, apparently satisfied that Richie isn’t about to collapse on top of their would-be attacker.

“Can we really afford to be picky?” Beverly asks, side-stepping the man’s inert body. Ben joins her, and Stan watches them exchange a glance that makes his heart hurt before they make a slow, cautious start toward the car.

She’s right. With a car, his chances of finding Patty alive and well are infinitely better than they are without. He feels the pavement become just a little more solid beneath his feet, and that’s enough to drive him forward, leaving the other four to keep an eye on the unresponsive, still-breathing form of the man in red.

The world still feels distant and strange enough that Stan is slow to react to the noise Beverly makes when she sees the inside of the car – a sharp gasp that becomes a strangled cry and then a whimper. Ben’s hands fly out to support her, and again all Stan can see is Patty, the way she’ll throw an arm out on impulse whenever she has to brake suddenly and Stan is sitting in the passenger seat. He’s never known if it’s a habit he picked up from her, or vice versa, or if it’s just one of those things people do for the people they love. 

His head is still in that cloud when he reaches the other two and catches a glimpse of the inside of the vehicle.

With that glimpse comes the low drone of dozens of flies and a wave of hot, evil-smelling air that makes Stan’s eyes water and bile rise in his throat. 

It looks like someone took a sponge, soaked it in blood and then pressed it into the upholstery of the driver’s seat. The back of the car is stuffed floor to ceiling with bodies, limbs bent like the legs of a giant spider, milky eyes looking in all directions, through and past Stan toward something unspeakable that only they can see. Something that twisted their expressions into pure, undiluted terror in the moments before they died.

The same thing, maybe, that left a wide, blank smile on the face of the single body that occupies the passenger seat.

Stan stumbles back so fast that he falls. His hands and elbows absorb the worst of the impact; they start to sting as he rolls onto his side and vomits onto the pavement.

“What?” he hears Eddie saying. “Guys, what the fuck”—?

“Don’t,” Stan pants, and can’t finish. 

“Don’t look,” Ben says, reaching past Bev and shoving the car door shut with enough force to rock the entire vehicle.

“Another?” Mike breathes. Stan nods and doesn’t look up from the blood on his hands.

“Fuck,” Richie hisses. “Eddie”—

“On it,” Stan hears, and then Eddie appears beside him, already shrugging off his pack and removing the first aid kit. He makes short work of cleaning up the scrapes and then wrapping a layer of clean bandages around them, bandaids for his elbows. Stan can tell he’s making a concerted effort not to look in the direction of the big, dark car with the tinted windows. His hands shake almost as much as Stan’s when he helps him back to his feet, but he still forces a smile that’s probably meant to be reassuring. Stan can’t bring himself to return the gesture, but he appreciates it. He appreciates that Richie hurries over to pick Stan’s phone off the ground; his hands feel too empty without it.

He reaches for it as soon as Richie’s finished dusting it off and checking it for cracks, but Richie freezes as the screen lights up in his hand.

“Hey,” he says, “you’ve got mail.”

Stan snatches the phone from his hands and checks the screen like it’s the only thing standing between him and the inside of that car. Sure enough, he has dozens of messages, and all of them from Patty. The last one was sent just under an hour ago, part of a string of updates and  _ ‘Please be okay’ _ s spanning all of the several days since the signal went out on Stanley’s end.

_ ‘They almost got in this morning, and a man was bitten. He’s very sick. I don’t know how much longer we can hold out like this, Stanley, but I promise I’ll try.’ _

-*-

Bill keeps a close eye on his fellow Losers as they continue on foot with a new sense of urgency and the closest thing to a real plan they’ve had yet. There’s reason enough to worry about  _ all _ of them in the wake of that encounter, but Bill finds himself glancing back at Mike in particular, again and again. All things considered, he seems to be holding it together pretty well, but Bill can’t help worrying. He’s not sure it’s a good sign that he seems to be focusing on reuniting Stan and his wife almost as single-mindedly as Stan himself is. Bill keeps remembering the pained look on Mike’s face as he drove his blade into the tires of the car, never quite daring to look at its owner, breathing and bleeding untouched on the ground nearby.

Getting Patty out of the supermarket she told Stanley about isn’t a question at all, but for the unspoken question of what to do with the man in red, everyone looked to Bill – and Bill looked to Mike, asked him if he still had his knife, the old, heavy, probably dull one that fits just right in his hand. That sent a ripple of unease through the group, but what were they supposed to do? Drive a knife into an unconscious man’s throat? Merciful, maybe, but beyond them. 

Better to make sure they can’t be followed, should the seemingly inevitable not happen on its own. Eddie’d mumbled something about slashing the fuel line instead of the tires, but he hadn’t volunteered any more information than that when Bill and Mike paused to look at him, so they hadn’t done it. Eddie’s the only one of them who’d know where to find the fuel line, and he  _ still  _ hasn’t stopped sporadically mumbling to himself while Richie looks on in quiet, helpless distress.

“You guys understand that none of us can even get  _ scratched _ , right? Not even a little. And no blood anywhere, okay, have you seen  _ 28 Days Later?  _ When that guy got one fucking drop in his eye and they had to kill him?”

“I’m surprised  _ you’ve  _ seen that,” Richie tells him. Everyone but Bill and Mike nods in quiet agreement, which Richie gladly takes as a sign of encouragement. “Relax, Eds, it isn’t the end of the world.”

Eddie bristles almost visibly and immediately rounds on Richie, but Bill suspects the light antagonism is just what the doctor ordered. Richie’s tiny smile suggests that he agrees.

Bill finally gives in to temptation and drifts back to Mike’s side.

“How are you holding up?”

Mike shrugs. “Just… trying not to think about it.”

“He was killing”—

“Yeah, but – but that wasn’t  _ him,  _ or not – not  _ just  _ him. It’s just like Pennywise, these things take advantage of the bad in people. If it weren’t for them…”

“But it h-has to be there first,” Bill points out, and then realizes how he must sound. “N-never mind. It’s not about… deserving it. It’s about…”

“Doing what you have to,” Mike finishes for him. His eyes stray toward the bat in his hands. Bill catches the uneasy look Bev throws their way as Richie’s grip on his own weapon tightens.

“To keep each other safe,” Bill says. 

“What else is there?” Beverly adds, soft but sure. Even Stan looks like he takes some strength from that. Hope, maybe, or a purpose. They may not be able to count on much, but they can count on each other. Bill sees the corners of Mike’s mouth turn up and feels his own do the same; it just feels right, and maybe Mike feels that too, because when Bill reaches over to take one of his hands off the bat, he’s already halfway to letting go.

Their hands fall to the shared space at their sides, their fingers tangled loosely and swaying with every step forward. The touch could be broken at a moment’s notice if it had to be, but to Bill it feels like they’ve formed a chain between them, something stronger than either of them alone. That’s just how Mikey is; he makes the people around him feel safe, always has.

When Bill finally turns his attention away from Mike long enough to check on the others, he’s just in time to see Richie tearing his eyes away from his and Mike’s joined hands. The gesture doesn’t have the awkwardness of someone who doesn’t know where to look, though; he looks at Eddie. He looks at him like he’s searching for something he doesn’t seem to find, and when he lets his gaze drop, it catches on the hand Eddie has wrapped around the strap of his backpack before finally settling anywhere but back in Bill and Mike’s general direction.

Like he’s seen something he thinks he shouldn’t have, or maybe thought it.

Bill watches Richie’s fingers twitch against empty air and wonders why he doesn’t just bridge the gap between them. It’s  _ Richie,  _ after all, Richie and Eddie. That’s what they do, in between all the bickering and stupid jokes. It’s how they work.

He doesn’t think better of saying something about it so much as he’s conveniently distracted from the idea by Stan excitedly gesturing at something from the head of the group.

Bill understands why Stan hurries  _ toward _ it instead of freezing in place when he also catches a hint of sun-bleached paint through a break in the trees up ahead.

A house – a little farmhouse, still as a grave with a single car parked in its long, gravel driveway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew, my apologies for the delay on a relatively short chapter! Work's been keeping me pretty busy, but I'll be enjoying a couple weeks of vacation starting on the 21st, which means loads more time to write! I aim to get another chapter of this fic out before I take a brief interlude to write some Reddie (and maybe Bike) Christmas/New Year's fluff, so keep an eye out for that if you're interested. Nothing plotty, of course, just some short sweet stuff for the season!


	3. National Average

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! It was more difficult to write than I thought it would be, but it's been fun playing around with a kind of writing that's challenging because I never do it!

“We don’t really have to go in there, do we?”

Beverly starts to answer Eddie’s question before she realizes that he’s not done talking, and that it was probably mostly rhetorical anyway.

On some level she’s still getting re-accustomed to the ways her friends communicate – or maybe just to the fact that they  _ do,  _ instead of keeping everything safely shrouded in silence.

“I mean, there’s a car,” Eddie is saying, gesturing emphatically at the awkwardly small sedan and totally missing Beverly’s half-open mouth in his own hurry to talk away some of the fear. It must be at least a  _ little  _ cathartic, like Richie’s jokes, or what would be the point of letting everyone and every _ thing  _ around you know you’re scared?

—“and we have food, we have water, Bev has a gun, we don’t need”—

“Wow, where was this fear of looting when we ransacked all those nice mom and pop stores back in Derry?”

Eddie glares at Richie; Beverly hides a smile behind her hand.

“It’s not the stealing, dickwad, it’s ‘what if there are fucking zombies in  _ there, too?’” _

“Don’t think so small, Eds. There could be so many things in there,” Richie says, gesturing at the front door. His tone is all teasing disagreement, but it’s perfectly clear that he’s helping Eddie build a case against entering. Beverly can’t blame either of them, really; it’s been a particularly rough day, and it’s still only early afternoon. There could be plenty worse to follow.

She certainly doesn’t want to risk seeing anything else like what she saw in that car. Not today, not ever – but what choice will she have about that, sooner or later?

“Do you think he came from here?” Ben asks beside her. He doesn’t have to clarify who “he” is; the grim look on his face would be clarification enough even if they weren’t all still thinking about it. 

Beverly drifts close enough to him that their sides brush; it isn’t much, but it helps. 

“I don’t think so,” she says. “What would he have needed a suit like that for out here?”

“Business trip?” Ben guesses, but there’s already a smile turning up the corners of his lips. “You’re probably right.”

The “I hope you are” kind of goes without saying.

Bill tries the handle of the car door. It swings open, and Beverly is irrationally relieved when no half-decayed bodies spill out onto the gravel at his feet. She feels Ben flinch beside her and reaches over to give his hand a reassuring squeeze.

Bill ducks inside for a moment before straightening up, empty-handed and frowning. Richie gives him a look:  _ So? _

“No keys,” he says. 

Eddie cradles his face in one hand and lets out a low groan. “I could try to hotwire it,” he says without much hope.

Richie raises both eyebrows at him. “You know how to hotwire a car?”

“Don’t you?” Eddie replies sarcastically.

Stan finally stops his impatient fidgeting and marches right up to the front door of the house. It’s a two-story place, chipped and worn-down by a lot of years, but with a nicely maintained little garden sitting off to one side. Beverly finds it difficult to imagine the sort of people who would carefully tend to a small patch of plants falling violently under the influence of those Things. The children. But the indifference, the apathy, the threat of death as an alternative? That’s all too easy to imagine.

Stan shoves at the door like he doesn’t expect to actually accomplish anything. When it easily swings away from him, he nearly falls through the open doorway. Both Bill and Mike take simultaneous steps forward as if they aim to catch him, and then even they freeze while Stan rights himself and glances around.

“Nothing here,” he says, turning back to the rest of them. “Come on, we need those keys.”

Bill and Mike bound up the porch steps after him. Richie whistles and doesn’t move. When Beverly glances back at him, he’s staring at Eddie, who looks painfully torn.

“Since when was Stan so fearless?” Richie mutters, sounding impressed.  _ That  _ question is definitely rhetorical; they all know he’d do anything to find his wife, zombies or no zombies. They all know what that feels like.

“Do you two want to be lookout?” Beverly offers, eyeing Eddie in particular. She doesn’t expect the guilty look he gives her, or the slight shake of his head. Richie looks considerably less surprised.

“Think it’s you and Ben’s turn,” Eddie says, raising an eyebrow at Richie – a question, or maybe more of a request.

Richie answers by throwing an arm around Eddie’s shoulders and walking both of them up the drive. 

“Don’t get too frisky out here on your own!” Richie calls back at them. Bev flips him off and pulls Ben in by the front of his shirt. She’s not even sure Richie sees the kiss until she hears him whistle again.

She also hears Eddie hiss something like “too fucking loud” at him before they disappear into the house, but he doesn’t shake off Richie’s arm despite the awkward tilt it introduces to his gait.

-*-

While Beverly watches the road for more unwanted company, Ben watches Beverly. He watches the way her laughter lines perfectly frame her smile when he leans in to kiss the top of her head, watches the steady, focused way she scans her surroundings, watches the way her hair catches the afternoon sunlight every time the breeze manages to lift a few strands of it. It’s been far too long since any of them have had the chance to shower, but as far as Ben’s concerned, Beverly is still radiant underneath all the dirt.

He still reaches out to carefully pluck a stray twig from her hair, just because. She turns her attention back to him and finds another one in his beard. She lets the wind carry it to the ground, and somehow – because it’s Bev, maybe – the accidental reminder of his own dishevelment doesn’t bother him so much. 

“Maybe I should consider a haircut,” she says, hand drifting back to brush at the ends of her own hair. 

He doesn’t miss the way her breath catches slightly at the end of her sentence, or the sliver of extra distance she casually puts between them as she searches his face for a response.

Ben doesn’t know what the right one is, exactly, so he settles for the honest one – his first thought, plus the slightly embarrassed smile he can’t quite swallow down.

“I could help, if you want,” he says. “I’m not exactly a stylist, but you’d make pretty much anything look good.”

“Even a Ben Hanscom haircut?” Bev teases. This smile is a slow one, relieved and maybe even a little charmed, so Ben lets himself hope he’s done the right thing – or at least something better than her creep of a husband would have done. “Tempting.”

“I can’t believe this,” Richie’s voice cuts in, followed by the crunch of several people’s feet on gravel. “We leave you two alone for ten minutes and you start holding hands. This is scandalous.”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Bev laughs, turning back toward the group as Ben follows suit. His face feels warm, but he’s not sure when that started. Clearly Bev has noticed, but the others seem fairly oblivious; to his credit, Richie doesn’t usually tease past the point of genuinely embarrassing anyone. Or, not…  _ too  _ far past that point – except for Eddie, maybe, if you replace embarrassment with exasperation.

“Did you find anything?”

Stan dangles a ring of keys from his finger. He’s already starting toward the car, apparently not too keen on offering to let anyone else drive. Ben tries not to think about the speed limits they’re about to blatantly disregard; it’s better than arriving too late, and if the past several days have been any indication, there may not be too many other cars to get into an accident with anyway.

“No food?” Beverly wonders. 

Mike shrugs apologetically. “There wasn’t much there we could use.”

“Whoever lived here got the hell out of dodge,” Richie explains, “and took all the good stuff with them.”

“Leaving us with this pathetic thing,” Eddie sighs, kicking up a little cloud of dust in the direction of their new ride just as Stan turns the key in the ignition and gives them all a pointed look when it kicks to life.

“W-we can make it work,” Bill tries to reassure him, making a weak attempt at herding the three closest to him toward the car.

Richie snorts. “Yeah, it’ll be just like a clown car. ‘How many forty year olds can you fit into one shitty Ford sedan?’ Stan’s got the best seat in the house, that’s for sure.”

Beverly nudges Ben while Eddie starts in on a rambling commentary on the dangers of not wearing seatbelts. “Five seatbelts, seven people,” he reminds them. “If we hit anything, half of us are gonna fly through the windshield!”

Bev laughs under her breath and says, just quietly enough to make it obvious that she’s only talking to Ben, “Think you could stand to have me on your lap?”

Ben takes in Beverly’s easy smile and responds in kind. “I don’t know, I hear it isn’t very safe.”

“It  _ isn’t!”  _ Eddie insists, brandishing a finger at them like an incensed school librarian. “You know more than half of traffic accident deaths happen to people who weren’t wearing seatbelts? That’s no joke, okay, it’s thousands of people  _ every year. _ ”

“There’s not much we can do about it now, though,” Ben says as placatingly as he can, already unshouldering his pack and climbing into the backseat with Beverly right behind him. She closes the door as soon as they’ve gotten themselves situated about as comfortably as they can hope to be, but Ben can still sort of make out Richie saying something that sounds like a question through the glass.

There’s almost no pause between him finishing with what sounds like Mike’s name and Bill answering.

Something, something, “so Eddie can keep an eye on” something, and then another question, this one definitely directed at Mike, who Bill turns to with an oddly hopeful smile.

Mike smiles back at him and nods. Both Richie and Eddie look relieved, although in Richie’s case, Ben’s not sure  _ why,  _ especially when it becomes clear that what Mike and Bill were agreeing to was sharing another seat, leaving the back middle and front passenger seats to Richie and Eddie respectively.

Despite obviously preferring this arrangement to possibly having to sit seatbelt-less on someone’s lap, Eddie doesn’t seem entirely satisfied with his navigator’s spot beside Stan; maybe it’s just that there’s nothing much – or nothing  _ pleasant _ , anyway – to look at once they get back on the road, but he keeps glancing back at the rest of them, Richie especially.

Maybe he’s just annoyed that Richie keeps staring at him; he must be able to see that in the rearview mirror despite Richie’s earnest attempts to disguise it as a vested interest in the view out the windshield. He stares through it like it’s the most interesting thing on the planet every time Eddie nearly catches him looking; the one time he and Eddie  _ do _ make accidental eye contact, Richie winks before Eddie can say anything, and then it’s  _ Eddie  _ who looks away first.

It doesn’t take all that long for the trees to give way to the burnt-out, skeletal remains of ruined buildings, busted-up storefronts and bodies. Richie’s barely finished suggesting that they play I Spy when they see the first one curled up behind the wheel of what used to be a car. It shuts him up more effectively than any “beep beep.”

Which is almost a shame, because Ben thinks he might’ve liked to play, if they kept the spying to the less morbid parts of the landscape.

Richie’s silence only lasts a minute or two before he heaves a sigh and mutters, “Why are there always burned up cars?”

Eddie turns to him with a frown. “Dude – what?”

“In movies, you know.  _ And  _ now. What causes so many fires? Is this just open season for arsonists?”

“Why did Derry flood?” Beverly returns, startling Ben enough for him to jump a little in his seat. He’d assumed she was asleep. She opens her eyes, then, to make sure he’s okay, and he smiles to show her that he is. The sleepy smile he gets in return is enough to make him actually believe it. 

When Richie doesn’t come back with a response to her mostly-rhetorical question, Bev adds, “I think things just burn. Fall apart. As long as it hurts people, they don’t care how or why it happens.”

“‘They,’ like the clown… spider things?” Eddie checks. He doesn’t wait for an answer before adding, “I think you’re right. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to be scary.”

He looks back out at the road ahead of them on the last word, and Ben guesses he’s thinking about the things waiting for them at the end of this drive. He knows better than to say it, but he can’t help wondering if the whole zombie thing is something the babies got from Eddie before they left Derry in the ever-broadening circle the news broadcasts suggested.

Not that it matters – it may make sense that Eddie’s as scared of zombies as he is of diseases that existed pre-clown apocalypse, but he’s not the only one in the world by a long shot. They would have lit on that idea eventually, one way or another.

Richie starts to say something else just before Stan takes them around a particularly tight bend in the road without slowing down in the slightest. Ben  _ hopes  _ he’s just imaging that the tires on his and Beverly’s side of the car lift off the pavement; he draws his arms a little more tightly around Bev, holding her fast against him – just in case.

He notices as they come out of the turn that Mike’s done the same with Bill.

Stan swears under his breath. “Sorry. We just. We have to hurry.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Richie says, except he sounds very far from reassuring, like he might throw up. Eddie shoots him a warning look from up front, while Mike gives him an awkward pat on the back that Richie ignores in favor of frowning at Eddie.

“Eddie,” Bill says, resting a hand on Mike’s forearm where it’s pressed against his stomach. Not holding it there, exactly, but like he just wants to acknowledge the gesture without saying anything. Ben feels like he’s intruded on something, noticing it.

“Yeah?” Eddie replies.

“Any idea how m-much longer?”

“Like an hour,” Eddie says, then pauses. The way he looks at the speedometer, it might as well be a venomous snake poised to strike. “No, like… forty minutes, or less.” Under his breath, he adds, “ _ This  _ is why we have seatbelts.”

Stan shoots him a look that falls somewhere between anxious and apologetic.

“This coming from the only one of us who’s crashed a car recently,” he says with just the barest hint of a smile. “At least you aren’t the one driving.”

It’s the closest thing to a joke Stan’s cracked since this all started; Ben’s so relieved to hear it that he breaks into a wide grin just as Richie barks a surprised laugh that earns him yet another dirty look from Eddie.

“He’s got you there, Eds.”

“That was the first accident I’ve had since college! And there were extenuating circumstances, like getting a call from a town I didn’t even remember being  _ from!” _

Ben asks the obvious question – “What happened in college?” – and maybe because he gets to it before Richie, Eddie actually answers. Reluctantly, which is how they know he’s not lying – plus, who’d lie about running into a mailbox because a moth flew into their face?

Ben appreciates the honesty enough not to make fun of him over it, but of course Richie is beyond delighted by the story and has no such reservations.

“You know this means we’ll probably see Mothman too, right? —Oh my god, what’s  _ that?” _

“What?!” Eddie and Bill both exclaim, turning to look skyward following Richie’s finger.

Eddie is the first to turn back, red-cheeked and glaring first at Richie and then at the rest of them. Ben honestly tries to bite back his own laughter, but feeling Beverly shake with laughter against him pushes him over the edge, and besides, it feels good. Eddie makes a show of telling Richie to fuck off, but Ben doesn’t think he’s really mad, either.

Stan gets another text from Patty at about the same time they reach a nightmarish pileup of cars near Gardiner.

It’s eerie, how perfectly timed it is; they roll to a stop behind a seemingly endless line of empty cars, and then comes the harsh plastic-on-plastic rattling of Stan’s phone against the inside of the center console’s cup holder. It scares all of them; Eddie’s hands fly to his face, Bev startles awake, and Stan snaps the phone up before the text tone can fade back to silence.

Ben only catches the first half of Stan’s rapid-fire explanation before he throws off his seatbelt and bolts out of the car.

“She needs me, something happened, I have to get to her, there’s”—

The rest of them tear out after him as soon as they can collect themselves enough to recognize that he has no intention of waiting for them. Mike pauses just a moment longer than the others to pick up Stan’s forgotten backpack, and he still has to jog to catch up with them – minus Bill, who hangs back just enough to ensure that they all stay more or less together.

Ben notices that Stan is scanning the cars as they rush past on the shoulder; he only understands  _ why _ when Stan’s eyes light on a big, red pickup truck with tires that look oversized even on its hulking frame.

“Eddie,” he cries, barely glancing back to ask, “could we drive this off-road?  _ In the grass,”  _ he adds more insistently when Eddie doesn’t respond right away.

_ “I  _ can,” Eddie says. When Ben turns to look at him in maybe too-obvious surprise, he sighs – or tries to, still a little breathless – and says, “Yeah, if we’re doing this, it better be me.”

Beverly rests a palm against Ben’s arm as they watch Eddie march up to the driver’s side of the cab, hoist himself up, and pull the door open. Richie follows close behind him with his bat at the ready; Eddie casts a grateful look over his shoulder that Ben is fairly certain Richie can’t see, probably by design.

Yeah, not really mad at all.

Richie never has any reason to use the bat. The only things left in the cab are a set of keys and a cup of very warm, very flat soda that Eddie disdainfully tosses out the window as soon as they’ve all piled in. 

Beverly offers to ride in the bed of the truck with her gun at the ready, but changes her mind when Ben insists on staying there with her. They don’t have time to discuss it, but Ben means it; he’d borrow a weapon from one of the others, and if it meant keeping Beverly safe beside him, he’d actually use it, too.

The sticking point, though, is that neither of them really wants the other to be stuck out there if things turn out to be really bad where they’re headed, so they resume their previous seating arrangement instead.

That turns out to be for the best, anyway, because Eddie’s driving is objectively terrifying to experience firsthand. If seatbelts were important with Stan behind the wheel, they’re  _ really  _ life or death now.

If Ben didn’t know better, he’d say Eddie enjoys breaking every rule of the road, though he swears as lines of motionless cars fly past that he’s never  _ normally  _ like this, just good enough at driving to pull it off. Ben doesn’t know how to describe Richie’s reaction to that. Loud, bright laughter, giddy almost. Impressed, maybe. Scared, definitely.

His expression only catches Ben’s attention in the first place because it reminds him of something familiar, something he can’t quite place.

The fear, though, that’s easy to place. They’re all painfully aware that they’re plunging head-first into a life-threatening situation, and that awareness begs distraction. For Ben, the distraction is Beverly’s hands in his and, unfortunately, the morbid questions he thinks they’ve probably all asked themselves at least a dozen times by now. 

Where the owners of that house went, or this truck’s driver. How it’s possible that they haven’t come across any of them in the process of coming or going. Whether they’ve all just escaped to parts unknown, or vanished the way people in Derry always did.

A new national average for missing people.

After a particularly hair-raising trip down a steep slope that leads them into town, Stan starts throwing incomprehensible directions at Eddie, who not only follows them perfectly but also takes shortcuts based on the convenience of not having to follow a single traffic law.

They start to see them even before they make it to the town’s main street.

Ben doesn’t understand why Eddie gags and nearly runs them into the aftermath of another collision, the crumpled mass of a minivan and a postbox, until he realizes that one of the people trudging along nearby is walking on a very broken leg. He can make out the pink-white point of a compound fracture, bone exposed to open air, and the person in question doesn’t seem to feel it any more than the man in red would have. 

But the man in red wasn’t shambling along riddled with bullet holes until Bev put one in him, and it wasn’t his own blood he was soaked in. His throat hadn’t been torn open by something too blunt to leave a clean wound. He wasn’t walking pain-free while his left arm dangled by a loose string of flesh.

“Eddie,” Richie says, a calmer echo of Stan’s desperate attempts to get him to slow down. “Eds, it’s right – hey, it’s here. Stop.”

Eddie does, all at once with a screech of tires and a shuddering gasp. Bodies thud against the front of the truck, and he hisses,  _ “There?” _

“Yes,” Stan says, and it’s probably only because Richie darts forward to grab the sleeve of his shirt that he doesn’t immediately open the door separating all of them from several dozens of shambling corpses. It’s like he doesn’t see them for the squat supermarket standing a parking lot away. The one with a broken window that’s already drawn the unfocused attention of several swaggering creatures.

“Looks like business was booming,” Richie comments with a grimace. He’s right; it’s not just that the lot has become a frothing sea of hungry bodies. It’s a small place, but almost every parking space is occupied, too.

Pre-storm shopping, Ben thinks. You see the news, you do the sensible thing. Stock up on canned goods, toilet paper, bottled water. 

For one blissful moment, Ben mistakes the collective gnashing of once-human teeth for the drone of insects, maybe, or hail, but that illusion comes crashing down as quickly as any of their hopes for an easy rescue mission when a blood-streaked hand hits the window inches from Ben’s face. He recoils, half-curling around Bev as he goes. He can feel the cold metal of her gun pressed between them, her hands tight around it. He knows without looking that her gaze is still fixed on the things outside.

“We h-have to get in there,” Bill says, but Eddie just grips the steering wheel tighter and shakes his head. 

“He’s right,” Mike repeats, eyeing Stan like he’s still afraid he’ll bolt at any moment if they don’t do  _ something _ . “Eddie, we have to move.”

“Back up,” Bill says, lurching forward to grab Eddie by the shoulder and shake. “Eddie”—

“But we can’t, we can’t get out,” Eddie is saying, part of a steady mantra of pleas and refusals. He looks as pale as some of the things outside, and he doesn’t respond to any of them until Richie shakes Bill off of him and climbs halfway over the center console to really get in his face.

“Eds, you’re gonna be fine, okay? We need you right here, okay, not out there”—he waits to get a nod from Eddie before continuing—“but you have to move the car”—

“Move it  _ where,  _ Rich—”

Richie turns to Bill for the answer to that; Bill has that look about him that’s always meant he’s made up his mind about a particularly risky plan. Hardly a plan at all, sometimes—

“Back up,” Bill says, ignoring Stan’s protests in favor of holding Eddie’s attention. “B-build up as much momentum as you c-can, and r-r-r”—

“Ram the building,” Mike finishes, exchanging a quick nod with Bill to confirm his guess. He points. “Straight through the glass up there.”

“You want me to crash the fucking car,” Eddie repeats. “You want”—

“Yeah, you’ll be an old pro at it in no time,” Richie says, giving his arm a quick pat. “Stan, tell Patty to get ready.”

Stan is already typing. “She knows.”

“I can’t”—

“Yeah, you can,” Richie interrupts Eddie again, and this time when he goes to touch him, he doesn’t take his hand away. “Look at me, Eds.”

From where Ben is sitting, it’s hard to make out Eddie’s expression, but Richie’s is indication enough that he at least does as Richie asks.

“We all trust you to get us out of here because we know you can. Besides,” he says, grinning maybe a little too fiercely to put anyone at ease, in Ben’s opinion, “it’ll be fun. How many people get to drive trucks into grocery stores consequence-free?”

Ben doesn’t expect Eddie to laugh at that, but he does, and Richie’s smile softens in response.

“Okay,” Eddie says, still just a little shaky. “Okay, fine, but buckle up first.”

Richie complies, looking pleased with himself. Beverly leans toward him and stage-whispers, “So you don’t fly through the windshield.” 

Ben smiles in spite of the broken and bleeding hands beating against the outside of the truck. He knows she’s trying to get a rise out of Eddie too, and while it may not work on him because he’s too busy throwing the truck into reverse like he’s channeling all his fear into the foot he presses to the accelerator, it makes Ben feel better. He guesses that’s why Bev and Richie get along so well; they both like to tease, and their teasing is, at least sometimes, just a way of making the rest of them feel better. 

(Beverly is better at it than Richie, though.)

Eddie absolutely floors it into the store. Ben doesn’t know how fast he manages to get the truck going despite the tide of bodies that rises to meet it, and he doesn’t think he wants to; he just makes sure to shield Beverly from the shower of broken glass that could be coming when they hit.

They go a lot farther than any of them really expected – through the floor-to-ceiling glass, across freshly glass-strewn linoleum, and straight into a display of chips and dip that goes hurtling back into one of the grocery aisles before they manage to skid to a stop. The screech of the truck’s massive tires trying to find purchase on the waxed linoleum floor is deafening even through rolled-up windows. 

Stan launches himself out of the car without any further ado. Beverly pulls Ben in for an urgent kiss before she follows, gun at the ready, and Ben forgets to consider the fact that he doesn’t even have a weapon; he just follows, grateful for the crunch of Bill, Mike and Richie’s feet hitting the floor behind him. 

Eddie starts to yell something after them, but he’s cut off by the last open door slamming shut behind Richie. He’ll be safe enough where he is, at least for a short while; the windshield is, impressively, cracked but not shattered.

The skid marks leading from the front entrance to where the truck sits idling are slick with blood, as is the truck itself; Ben’s stomach churns at the site of red blood on red paint, like someone tried to cover up the fresh dents and deep scrapes they’ve left on the vehicle using nothing but human gore. 

He doesn’t have time to register any more than that; the things outside are slow, thank god, but they’re coming. Never mind the ones that are already there, wandering just a little less aimlessly now that something interesting has literally exploded onto the scene. 

Stan leads them all to the back corner of the store – or, more accurately, he runs in that direction without a care in the world for who or what follows him.

They find a metal door set between two lines of coolers. The door is clean, mostly, save for a few sets of bloody handprints. It’s thrown open from inside before Stan can reach it; Ben watches Beverly come a hair’s breadth from firing at the figure that emerges from the dark inside, but Stan’s first instinct is exactly the opposite. He throws his arms open wide, taking quicker, longer steps toward the blonde woman until they collide in a mess of tangled hair and tangled limbs.

Ben doesn’t relax his own guard until he gets a better look at the woman’s face – Patty, of course, with the same pair of glasses and kind smile she had in the picture Stan showed them before. There’s a smear of blood on her cheek, but she isn’t gnashing her teeth at Stan, and Ben suspects the blood isn’t hers.

_ A man was bitten,  _ he remembers Stan saying.

“This is great and all, but can we do this later?” Richie says, throwing an anxious glance back in the direction of the truck. As if on cue, a resounding honk pierces through the relative quiet of the store. Richie looks particularly desperate to bolt back toward it.

“We can’t leave everyone else,” Patty says, wide-eyed. She holds Stan out at arm’s length, checking him for obvious injuries as she talks. “Some of them need to be taken to a hospital, Stanley”—

“‘Everyone else?’” Mike repeats. “Stan didn’t”—

“Mention it,” Stan says in lieu of an apology. He’s as laser-focused on Patty as she is on him. “It was… implied. We can use the truck bed if we have to, right?”

“How m-many?” Bill asks Patty.

“A lot of people left,” she says, “or tried to, but they couldn’t…” She swallows back tears and says, “Now it’s just the five of us.”

“Mrs. Uris?”

A kid emerges from the same door Patty came through. He can’t be any older than twenty, maybe twenty-one, but he’s tall – almost as tall as Ben and Richie.

He’s using his shoulder to support what looks like most of the weight of a man with more gray in his hair than Bill, and enough wrinkles that Ben guesses he’s at least a decade older than the rest of them. 

The older man is soaked in sweat and white as a sheet. It becomes obvious why when Ben catches a glimpse of the nasty bite wound on the arm he isn’t actively using to keep himself upright. 

“Where are the other two?” Richie asks impatiently. Another honk echoes back from the front of the store, and a flash of something close to panic crosses his face. “Guys,  _ please.” _

“Coming,” the younger guy says. “They’re coming. Mrs. Walker isn’t doing so hot. Sydney’s trying to help her, but they won’t be able to run.” He looks nervously at Bill. “Are we gonna have to run?”

“Sorry to say I can’t manage that, either,” the older guy grunts, sounding pained.

Bill looks from the kid to Mike, who gives both strangers a rushed attempt at a reassuring smile.

“We’ll do our best to help,” he promises. “But we do have to hurry.”

He gives Bill a pointed look, then, and together the two of them disappear into the room behind them.

Ben’s stomach sinks when he sees the woman they re-emerge with. It’s horrible, but his first thought is that they’re dragging a corpse along between them, and he’s only proven wrong when she moans, low and ominous. Like what Ben imagines the phrase “death rattle” exists to describe.

Ben can see the same thought cross Beverly’s face right as it occurs to him. This isn’t a horror movie; if things as improbable as zombies exist in the mix of things that can kill you now, then they don’t have to see it happen in front of them to know what a bite means. But they may be about to see it anyway, and Ben’s only instinct is to get his friends away from it as soon as possible.

“Jesus,” Richie mutters.

“Do you guys know if the hospital is open?” a girl about the other kid’s age asks, following the other three out and squinting a bit at the sudden change in brightness. Sydney, presumably.

“Only one way to find out,” Richie says, taking a few steps toward the front of the store. When they don’t all move to follow, he rounds on them again. “Come on, how many of these things do you wanna have to fight to get out of here? Because the number’s only going up.”

“We have to fight?” Sydney repeats. The other kid blanches.

They don’t give them any more time to protest. Ben takes over carrying the old man, gingerly avoiding touching his blood-soaked side as much as possible. Beverly shoots down the first lurching figure that makes it past the lines of shelves – a clean shot to the head, the practiced aim of a professional with next to no experience – and then they take off running.

The truck’s horn sounds again, longer and more urgent this time, but it’s muted in comparison to the roaring in Ben’s ears. He nearly trips over a pile of cereal boxes that’s been knocked onto the floor and is so preoccupied with trying to right himself and the man he’s carrying that he only  _ hears  _ Richie’s bat make contact with something several paces ahead.

Something hard, by the sound of it, and wet. He looks back up to see Richie gagging as he clumsily sidesteps another body. There’s blood on his bat, but he’s making an obvious effort not to stare at it even as it oozes dangerously close to his hand. His eyes are fixed on the truck just a few yards away.

Eddie must see them, too, because the truck lurches into motion as Ben watches. There are zombies spilling around it like a stream around a boulder. Like a hoard of ants looking for crumbs. 

Eddie reverses into several of them, angling the truck like he’s parallel parking before he shifts back to drive. The maneuver sends several more reanimated bodies crashing to the ground, like long grass laid flat by heavy boots.

It also brings the passenger side doors of the truck nearly flush with the entrance to the aisle they’re running down. Stan and Patty make it to them first, and Stan wastes no time in jerking one open so that Patty can climb to safety ahead of him. 

“You won’t all fit!” Eddie yells through the open door. Ben wishes he could say he’s never seen him look so terrified. 

“The back!” Bill shouts, already leading Mike and Mrs. Walker to the open door and then using the floor of the cab as a foothold to climb into the bed of the truck. Ben doesn’t expect him to have the strength to pull the sick woman up after him, even with Mike’s help, and it obviously does cost him a great deal of effort, but he manages, and then Mike hoists himself up, too. He reaches for the old man at Ben’s side, and this time it’s easier, because he, at least, is still responsive. He does what he can to help them move him, but it’s obvious how little strength he has left for it.

Ben tries not to think about that.

He ushers the college kids – because he thinks they’re college kids, probably, or at least the right age for it – into the cab behind Patty and Stan. Bev has to shoot down another zombie when it comes too close for comfort; the crack of the shot going off is deafening at such close range. 

He tries to help Bev into the cab, too, but she reaches past him and slams the door shut with a finality he can’t contest. 

“I can keep them off the back,” she tells him. He hardly hears her, but he thinks he sort of knew she’d say it even before she did.

Because she’s strong – strong enough to protect them, and strong enough to trust them to do the same, and  _ what else is there? _

Ben looks back at Richie, half expecting him to go for the front seat beside Eddie, but he’s still there with the rest of them, bat poised to strike at the things trying to reach gory, grimy hands up over the walls surrounding the truck bed. They’re lucky the tires are so huge, Ben starts to muse, but Richie doesn’t let him finish that thought.

_ “Move,”  _ Richie says, and Ben does, but not without immediately turning to drag Richie up after him. Richie takes the hand he offers only after he’s tossed the bat up ahead of himself.

The rear window of the cab slides open as Richie crashes onto the metal floor alongside Ben, and they hear Eddie order them all to hold on  _ tight  _ before the truck kicks into motion one more time.

Ben is caught off guard when they don’t turn back toward the jagged hole left by their entrance; instead, Eddie takes them past several check-out lanes, to a corner of the store that Ben now sees has already suffered several additional broken windows – all of them hurriedly barricaded with heavy racks and boxes.

There are no zombies waiting there now – drawn away by the initial crash and then the blaring truck horn, probably – but Ben can easily imagine clawing hands snaking through the holes in those weak defenses.

Suddenly, the decision to hide in a back storage room makes a lot more sense, as does the decision, however risky, to run.

This time, it’s Beverly who presses a palm to the back of Ben’s head, forcing him down just in time to avoid a face full of broken glass and metal. He can dimly hear people shouting over the ear-splitting crash of their truck hitting the windows, Bill and Mike and the old man. Richie, too, except that whatever he’d been in the process of saying is cut off with a sharp cry and a thud.

When Ben sits back up, he sees clouds gathering in the late-afternoon sky. He sees Beverly with a small cut on her hand, but otherwise unharmed, desperately pushing her hair out of her face as she takes stock of their surroundings.

The truck bounces and heaves like a ship on the open sea, but at least no one has fallen out. Mrs. Walker is practically comatose on the floor of the truck bed, sprawled out while Bill holds a protective hand over her, ready to catch her in the seemingly unlikely event that they’re all sent flying. Mike has a hand wrapped around Bill’s arm in turn, Bev’s dropped her pistol to grab at Ben, and the old man is clinging dazedly to the wheel tub. Richie—

Richie is lying, ragdoll-limp, against the tailgate at the back of the truck, bleeding from a long gash in his forehead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I beg of thee don’t too closely examine the geography of Maine that this story does or does not imply, I've been there once in my life and am settling for the most haphazard of research.


	4. Something Unspoken

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter it took me a While to get out, but I'm pretty happy with this one! Thank you for being patient and also for your lovely comments! I'm sorry for the radio silence on my end, but they've been a pleasure to read and I'd like to answer everyone over the next few days! Better late than never, right?

“Don’t move him! Don’t move him!”

Mike’s warning comes just soon enough to keep Bill and Ben from trying to drag Richie back toward the front of the truck. They freeze beside him instead, hands hovering but not quite touching. Mike freezes, too, because beyond that, he can’t remember what they’re supposed to do. In this situation, he doesn’t know what they  _ can  _ do.

Stop the bleeding, of course, but they can’t risk exposing an open wound to the virus – assuming there even is a virus, that is. Assuming Its offspring were that consistent about the things they put into the world.

Two things happen then, one after another. First, Eddie looks over his shoulder, meeting Mike’s gaze first and then settling for several beats too long on Richie.

Second, they hit something. Mike doesn’t know what – too busy arriving at the panicked conclusion that they have to stop as soon as possible so that Eddie can put his marginally more adequate medical knowledge to use – but whatever it is, it decimates one of their tires. Mike’s pretty sure the noise he hears is the blowout, rather than the impact itself.  _ Boom  _ – and then the car jerks abruptly to the left, throwing all of them off balance.

Eddie swears loudly enough that Mike can hear it through the open rear window – or the open, fully shattered windshield, which is probably only zombie-free thanks to sheer dumb luck. 

Somehow, he manages to correct the truck’s trajectory before they collide with anything else. Eddie lets the car slow on its own, but he doesn’t let it stop. 

“Can we drive like this?” Mike hears Patty ask.

“We can’t stop here,” Beverly says, probably not loud enough for Patty to hear it over the loose flapping of the tire’s shredded remains against debris-littered asphalt. Eddie answers, too, something affirmative and only very superficially calm. Stan responds to whatever it was without any veneer of calm at all.

“Since  _ when?!” _

“Not  _ everything _ you see in horror movies is real, Rich— Stan—fuck,” Eddie snarls at the dashboard. “You can drive on the rims if you have to, and we  _ really fucking have to –  _ would you assholes please fucking  _ hold on to him back there?” _

Mike sees Eddie steal another panicked look at Richie’s prone form just as Stan and Patty look back, too, confused and then alarmed. Bill is busy pressing his flannel to the cut on Richie’s head; Mike doubts Eddie approves very much of  _ that,  _ but the sight of it comes with an ill-timed surge of affection nevertheless.

It’s the strangest sensation, the combination of love and sick, gut-twisting fear.

He can see Eddie’s mouth moving in the rearview mirror, his whole expression twisted like he’s only managing to hold back tears because he won’t be able to see the road if he lets them out. Mike’s learned well enough how to read lips after decades spent alone in Derry, or he’s at least gotten good at guessing what people are saying. Cruel things, more often than not, so it was usually pretty easy to fill in the blanks.

_ Anyone _ could tell it’s Richie’s name Eddie’s repeating to himself as his hands start to shake and the truck weaves its way out of town.

They don’t make it very far past the last straggling undead before the car grinds to a lopsided halt and Eddie appears at the back, grimacing at the blood smeared over the truck’s exterior and using a spare shirt he drags out of his pack to pull the gate down.

“Let me see,” he says without preamble. “Let me see him.”

As if on cue, Richie’s eyes flutter open, and he winces, squeezing them shut again before Eddie makes it to his side. Bill doesn’t appear to lighten up on the pressure against Richie’s head, but he does murmur an apology. Mike would have gone to his side, chest all aglow with quiet admiration, if it weren’t for Eddie’s immediate and very adamant insistence that they give him some space. 

“And don’t push too hard on that,” he tells Bill, who nods apologetically. Mike watches the tense muscles in his arms relax slightly; Eddie doesn’t seem to notice. “It – he could have a fracture. Lighten up.”

Eddie’s crying in earnest by the time he presses two fingers to the pulse point at Richie’s wrist and says his name like he’s pleading with him, again and again.

Richie frowns and only gets his eyes about halfway open before he makes a retching sound somewhere in the back of his throat. If anything, Eddie’s crying just  _ intensifies,  _ but he knows what to do long before the thought would have occurred to Mike. 

He scoots close enough to Richie to rest his head on his lap without having to move him too much more than that. He helps him turn his head just in time to get covered in vomit, but the oddest part of it is that he hardly reacts to that. He doesn’t even seem to notice that Bill is still sitting beside him, struggling to keep his discarded shirt in place without getting in the way of Eddie’s work.

“What fucking  _ happened,”  _ Eddie demands, and now he’s looking up at the rest of them with scared, angry tears still glistening in his eyes. The kids have come around from the cab along with Stan and Patty, who looks almost as distraught as Eddie when she sees Richie.

_ Almost. _

No one knows the answer to Eddie’s question; it’s Richie who finally breaks the uneasy silence.

“‘S what I was gonna ask,” he croaks. He tries to screw his eyes shut again, but Eddie gives his cheek a few gentle pats to get his attention.

“Rich, hey, stay with me,” he says tearily, “come on, look at me, please, you fucking asshole”—

Richie groans and blinks a few times, but he doesn’t answer Eddie again. Eddie contradicts his own request by taking another handful of clean-looking fabric out of his pack and wiping gingerly at the blood that’s dripped into Richie’s right eye, forcing it shut and eliciting another plaintive noise from his friend.

Some of the blood’s wound up on Eddie’s pants, too, but he doesn’t take any more notice of that than he did of the vomit. He nudges Bill’s hand away – the blue of his shirt almost soaked through, not to mention the accumulated dust it was already covered in – and re-folds the off-white fabric to press it gently to the still-bleeding wound.

The rest of Eddie is still shaking, but his hands have gotten impressively steady. Richie’s gaze wanders for a moment before settling back on Eddie’s face. Eddie lets him turn his head so he’s looking straight up again, getting a better view. Trying to focus, by the looks of it.

“Eds. Wha’ happened?”

Eddie sucks in a sharp breath and doesn’t tell him that he’s already asked that question once.

He doesn’t tell him anything at all, actually, until Bev steps in. 

“Something hit you,” she says, rubbing lightly at Richie’s arm. “You were knocked out.”

She looks like she wants to say something else, but she doesn’t. No one does, although Eddie takes one hand away to dig out his first aid kit.

It takes Richie another long moment to respond, but at least he seems to register Beverly’s answer, because he glances briefly at her before he finally says, “Explains the headache.”

“Does anything else hurt?” Eddie asks him immediately. “Can you move?”

Richie starts to do just that, but Eddie swears and eases him back down. “Just wiggle your legs or something, idiot, I haven’t even cleaned this yet.”

Richie’s eyes widen. Mike realizes, belatedly, that he doesn’t have his glasses, and casts a glance around in hopes of finding them. He finds Bill, instead, crouched near the old man – still conscious but too sick to look particularly worried about the stranger he’s only just met – with one half of a functional pair of glasses held delicately in one hand.

“Probably n-not the best time to ask him if he has another pair,” Bill comments with a grimace that has no business looking that charming given the circumstances. Mike smiles a little and shakes his head, forgetting for a moment about the very real danger they’re still in.

He doesn’t even realize he’s also forgotten to listen to whatever Richie says next until he’s dragged back to reality by Eddie letting out a choked sob and crying, “No, no, no you weren’t, Richie, what do you  _ mean,  _ were you bitten, wouldn’t you – wouldn’t you  _ know?” _

“Don’t remember,” Richie says, almost dismissively if it weren’t for his scared frown.

“What did he say?” Mike hears himself asking, his whole body going cold with horror. “Guys – does he have a bite wound?”

“No,” Beverly says quickly, “just the one on his forehead.”

“Which is probably from the glass,” Ben says. “It’s too clean.”

“But h-have we checked?” Bill says, grabbing Mike by the hand and pulling him into the huddle that’s forming around Richie despite Eddie’s earlier warning. Stan and Patty keep their distance, but not by much. 

Meanwhile, Ben is busy trying to get Richie to move each of his limbs individually. Richie looks vaguely put upon and refuses to actually look at anyone but Eddie, but he follows Ben’s instructions with shorter and shorter pauses in between. Mike watches Bill examine their friend for bites or suspicious-looking scratches while Eddie warns him in hushed, urgent tones that the next part will “sting a little, but please hold still.”

“If you’ll stop crying,” Richie tells him, finally cracking a little smile.

“Fuck you,” Eddie snaps, but his hands are gentle as he finishes pouring one of their few remaining bottles of water over the wound. The bleeding has lightened up enough by now that the water runs pink rather than scarlet, but Eddie doesn’t look at all comforted by that. He moves on to ripping open a paper packet of cleansing wipes to give the gash another careful pass. 

Richie passes on the hand Beverly offers him, instead reaching up to tug at the edge of Eddie’s jacket.

“What?” Eddie asks. He doesn’t sound annoyed; he even pauses halfway through squeezing some Neosporin onto the finger of one of his disposable gloves so that he can give Richie his full attention.

Richie just looks at him for a moment, then shrugs a little and says, “Toldja you could do it.”

Eddie sniffles a bit and shakes his head. “Didn’t exactly get you out in one piece.”

“I’m okay,” Richie disagrees. “…Can you see bone?”

Eddie flinches. “No, it’s just – head wounds just bleed a lot, Rich. I – look, I can’t remember if I should even be using water to clean this and I’m kind of freaking out about it, in case you couldn’t fucking tell, but I wouldn’t have done that if I could see bone. You’ll – you might need stitches, and we don’t have anything to numb this with, and – fuck, maybe I shouldn’t’ve”—

“Eddie,” Mike says, “slow down.”

“You’re doing better than most of us could,” Beverly agrees.

“What she said,” Richie says. He looks at Eddie again, and this time Mike thinks he’d call his expression considering. Cautious. He still hasn’t let go of Eddie’s jacket. Instead, he tightens his grip and adds, “I trust you.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t,” Eddie mutters between fresh tears. 

“The hospital is just back a few miles,” the girl – Sydney – interjects. Mike had almost forgotten she was there. “We can”—

“It won’t be open,” the older man interrupts, not unkindly. “Wouldn’t make a difference to us, anyway. Maybe for him.”

“How can it not be open?” she insists. “There are sick people!”

“If I thought there was any chance I could get him to an actual doctor, obviously I would,” Eddie says, nodding at Richie as he finishes applying the antiseptic cream. “But I’m not risking anything like that again, okay?” 

“Risk what?” Richie mumbles with another wince. It looks like the cream stings plenty more than a little, and the careful, searching touches Eddie starts applying to the rest of Richie’s head don’t seem to do him any favors, either. Eddie’s uncharacteristically patient explanation, complete with as much of a play-by-play as Eddie can offer, might; Mike can’t tell how much of it Richie pays attention to, but at least he doesn’t seem to be struggling to keep his eyes open and focused on Eddie.

Mike thinks sort of absently about all of Richie’s thinly veiled attempts to cheer him up these past several days. Richie doesn’t look worried the same way Mike probably has, but that’s kind of the problem, so maybe Mike’s next words are fifty-fifty a genuine suggestion and a weak attempt to get a reaction out of Richie. Or reassure him, if he needs it.

Eddie looks like he could use it, anyway.

“The next town could be safer.” Or if not safer, then at least not overrun by the living dead. They’ll have to take what they can get, and they’ll have to start moving again soon. “They do different things to different places, so maybe we’ll at least be able to pick up better supplies.”

“Get in and out s-safely,” Bill agrees. “If we can find another car.”

_ “What  _ does different things? Those monsters back there?” the younger guy says. He looks understandably nervous and keeps glancing back in the direction of town like he expects more of said monsters to appear. It’s not an unreasonable expectation to have, and for a moment Mike can hardly breathe through the guilt.

“Yeah,” Bill says for him, “or the th-things that made them.”

His eyes don’t leave Mike’s face – and, well, vice versa – until Sydney goes to check on Mrs. Walker and makes a noise that cuts straight through the low buzz of talking and planning behind her. It even finally gets that rise out of Richie, who tries to bolt upright and only partially succeeds with some help from Eddie.

Despite being one of the farthest away, Patty is the first person to move to Sydney’s side. She doesn’t manage to finish asking any questions before the dam breaks.

“She’s not breathing!” Sydney wails. “This is why I  _ said  _ we need a hospital! We have to do something!”

Stan launches himself onto the bed of the truck and tries to tug Patty back, away from the body; she stands up with him, but only after coaxing Sydney away, too. Just a few steps back – not enough, if whatever might be about to happen happens too fast.

Out of the corner of his eye, Mike sees Eddie help Richie more fully into a sitting position. He keeps one arm wrapped tight around his shoulders, like he doesn’t dare lean him back against the metal behind them and let go. His eyes are glued to the scene in front of them; Richie just looks lost.

“Shouldn’t we go?” he says, looking at Bill this time.

“Where are we gonna find a functioning hospital, Richie?” Eddie says tightly. 

“Best hospital in the world can’t do much past a point,” the old man says. Something about the resigned way he says it ties Mike’s stomach in knots.

“Ralph,” Patty says, kneeling again and trying to help the man up with them.

“No, no,” he says tiredly, “no, you folks need to get a move on. I think you oughta just think about doing what she asked of you, and if you can spare one more bullet…”

“Did she ask what I think she asked,” Eddie breathes, paling. It’s not really a question, but Patty nods shortly anyway. She still hasn’t straightened up again. Stan has one hand held against her back, the other curled around her hand, a makeshift barrier between her and the threat of danger.

“Do you mean she’s dead?” the kid asks shakily.

“She taught English,” Sydney says. She doesn’t say it to him – or to any of them, really – but it’s answer enough. “She wrote one of my recommendations when I was applying to colleges. I wasn’t supposed to ever see it, but she showed it to me once anyway. It was really nice.”

Her voice breaks at the same time as the stillness that had settled over them does. Mike catches sight of movement behind Sydney too late to actually do anything about it; as it is, it’s all Stan and Patty can do to get out of the way of Mrs. Walker before what was once a kindhearted teacher lets its mouth fall open like rusty cellar doors, revealing bloodstained teeth for just an instant before they disappear again – this time into Sydney’s neck.

For a moment it’s as if the truck is still moving through stomach-dropping lurches, careening over the broken pieces of buildings and personal belongings, bucking like a startled horse.

Patty tries to get to Sydney with the same single-minded desperation as a parent trying to pull a child from a burning building that’s already in the process of collapsing. It’s what Mike sees in his mind’s eye, clear as any of Its apparitions, and before he can see anything else his eyes well up with tears that burn so bad he has to close his eyes.

Something bowls into him, and for a moment he thinks,  _ That’s it,  _ and he can’t bring himself to open his eyes as he waits for the pain to come.

It never does.

Two shots ring out a moment later, one and then another, and the truck dips under the weight of two more bodies falling.

When Mike opens his eyes, he doesn’t see blood or fire or darkness deep enough to swallow him up; he sees Bill, hair as wild as his eyes, lips moving in the shape of Mike’s name, arms a wall between Mike and the carnage behind them.

“Are you okay?” he asks, bringing one hand up to Mike’s forehead before it slips around to shield the back of his head. A tear escapes the corner of Mike’s eye just as Ben’s voice picks up again somewhere over Bill’s shoulder. At first he just repeats Bev’s name, concerned but not distraught – not horrified in that way that would make Mike’s blood run cold. Mike hears him segue into quiet pleas to “let go.”

Mike can hear crying, too – Patty, he guesses. He catches a glimpse of Stan with his arms wrapped around her, guiding her back out to the sun-bleached grass that separates the town from freeway and road from forest.

“M-Mikey, hey, d-did – your head”—

Mike blinks back at Bill. “Is everyone okay?”

The last thing he expects Bill to say instead of “yes” or even “mostly” is the very insistent “Are  _ you?”  _ that he actually offers in response. For just a moment, he sounds more like Eddie than himself.

“Thanks to you,” Mike says, dumbstruck. “And – and no, I didn’t hit my head.”

“More for me, then,” Richie says, sounding woozy and a little muffled; Mike turns to look and sees that his face is half-buried in Eddie’s shoulder. He has his arms wrapped around Eddie, only the slightest bit more loosely than Eddie’s holding him; it would be hard to tell who initiated that embrace if it weren’t for Eddie’s rapid, uneven breathing.

It’s only then that Bill eases off of Mike, helps him up and finally asks after everyone. He doesn’t let go of Mike’s hand; Mike doesn’t think he wants him to.

No one answers Bill directly, except for Stan, who throws an incredulous look over his shoulder midway through rubbing slow, comforting circles into Patty’s back.

“What part of this could possibly be okay?”

Beverly is shaking against Ben, who hugs her with only one arm; for a moment, Mike’s stomach drops, but then he sees Beverly’s gun in Ben’s free hand, gingerly pointed down and away from the two of them. No bites, but two bodies growing cold, and only one of them already dead before the gun went off.

It was a mercy and they all know it, but Mike knows all too well how cold that comfort probably feels.

They don’t leave it up to Bev to take that last shot; Mike doesn’t want to leave it to Bill, either, regardless of his predictable decision to volunteer, but Bill gives him that quietly pained look and asks who else can, and Mike decides that he’s right – he’s  _ half _ right. 

He wraps his hand around Bill’s, around the gun, and he takes the other half of that weight without needing to say a word.

-*-

Under any other circumstances, Patty’s desire to get properly acquainted with her husband’s friends would have translated to actually introducing herself to them.

Under  _ these  _ circumstances, it’s all any of them can do to make the long, slow walk up to and along the freeway in the tense, exhausted almost-silence that fills the space between murmured check-ins and reassurances. The man Stanley eventually introduces as Eddie Kaspbrak does a lot of that, on top of repeatedly reminding the rest of them to slow down as he guides his injured friend over the uneven ground.

His friend – Richie, another face to match one of the names she remembers Stanley telling her about – answers all of Eddie’s  _ how are you doing _ ’s and  _ do you need a rest _ ’s quite patiently. It would probably reassure the rest of them more if he didn’t also keep forgetting the answers to his own repeated questions about where they’re going and what they’re doing.

(Trying to find a car big enough for all of them, and then – because they’ve a vague notion to head back the way Patty came, only steering clear of the bigger cities for now – the relative safety of one of the houses she remembers passing.)

Richie looks sick, but not sick like the others. As if things hadn’t ended badly enough – Patty doesn’t know what she would have done if any of these people had been bitten because of her.

Letting go of Stanley even for a moment is like moving from a warm hot tub to the Arctic ocean, but Patty does it anyway, albeit only for as long as it takes Richie to thank her for trying to help support his other side, “But it’s okay – really. Stan might actually kill me if I steal you. ‘Sides, I’ve got this tiny, like… five foot four guy to lean all over.”

“Five foot  _ nine,  _ dickwad,” Eddie snaps. “I’m literally – no offense,” he says, nodding at Patty, who cracks a smile when he finishes,  _ “literally  _ taller than her.”

“Huh, must be the double vision playing tricks on me,” Richie says nonchalantly. 

That joke starts up another round of genuinely concerned questioning, apparently contrary to Richie’s expectations. Patty returns a bit sheepishly to Stanley’s side when Eddie starts checking the size of his friend’s pupils again; she isn’t sure if she should feel a bit guilty about starting it until she sees her husband rolling his eyes, feigning annoyance but looking fond enough to soften some of Patty’s heartache.

So, she thinks to herself, he must not have been overstating those two’s dynamic when he told her about them. Patty finds herself looking forward to finding out what they’re like when one of them isn’t hurt, and that’s good – to look forward to something. To as many somethings as possible.

“He must be feeling better,” Stanley says. The end of his sentence fades into a contented sigh as Patty loops an arm back around Stanley’s waist. They slip back into an easy rhythm, walking side by side, as close as a couple of cats with their tails intertwined.

“That’s good,” Patty says, and again, “That’s good.”

Stanley smooths the pad of his thumb against Patty’s waist in slow, circular motions and says, “Babylove.”

She smiles at the nickname. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry we took so long,” he says, but then he shakes his head a little, soft brown curls flopping across his forehead. “Thank you for waiting for me.”

“Well, I couldn’t miss meeting your friends,” she says through the fresh tears that come at the thought of the people she’d waited with. Good people, all of them, and only Oliver and herself left to remember.

She’ll tell Stanley about each of them when it’s safe to rest, and he’ll tell her about his sunburnt cheeks and scraped-up palms and everything he’s seen. The good and the bad.

For now, though, she settles for basking in the warm glow of Stanley’s steadfast presence at her side. She helps him climb into the third SUV they check for keys at Eddie’s behest. Third time’s the charm, and all the better because this one is the largest – a full-size car with three rows of seats, enough for eight people and capable of going off road until they can get past the long lines of eerily empty vehicles.

She and Stanley volunteer to share a seat almost in the same breath. It’s not really a sacrifice; the closer she can get to Stanley, the better.

Mike is the one who offers to drive, and no sooner has the car kicked into motion than all Patty’s sleepless nights catch up to her at once. Despite her best effort to stay awake and alert, she falls asleep with her head tucked against the hollow of Stanley’s neck and his arms wound tight around her.

It’s the safest she’s felt in days.

-*-

It starts raining over half an hour before they pull into the empty driveway of one of the first houses they come across. The house is crisp and clean and would probably be surrounded by a white picket fence if it had been built several decades earlier, instead of probably some time in the last ten, maybe five years.

Eddie immediately hates it and all the nearly-identical houses that flank it in neat, carefully-portioned little rows. They rise up like the jagged edges of a long, deep trench against the blackening sky, all sharp edges glinting under the pale glow of street lamps. 

He thinks that Myra would probably like it, and just like that his attention rubber-band snaps back to Richie, whose eyes have drifted shut again in the few moments Eddie’s left him unbadgered. 

He pokes him in the ribs, and Richie starts awake with an unhappy grunt.

“Eddie won’t stop poking me,” he complains blearily. Eddie wishes it were for the first time – or, actually, he just wishes he could be sure Richie knows it’s  _ not. _

“Even I know you’re not supposed to go to sleep with a concussion,” Stan tells him, blinking awake as the car’s engine kicks off and the overhead lights come on; Patty, Ben and Bev remain fast asleep. The kid – whose name Eddie’s just now realizing he  _ still  _ doesn’t know – hasn’t said a word in all the time he’s spent staring out the window in the back. If he weren’t so busy worrying about Richie, Eddie thinks maybe he’d be kinda worried about  _ that. _

“What, like,  _ ever?”  _ Richie says petulantly. 

“Just for a  _ while,” _ Eddie reminds him, a little unhelpfully. He’s not about to admit it, but he’s not even really sure that this part of concussion aftercare isn’t just a myth; for once in his life, he wishes he’d spent  _ more  _ time online reading about injuries he’s never actually had.

He just can’t risk it – not with Richie. So sue him if he needs a little extra reassurance that Richie’s brain isn’t swelling or bleeding or any of the other grisly hypotheticals that have kept Eddie painfully wide awake through this entire drive.

The house is locked, because of course it is. Eddie doesn’t even have time to get some tools out of his pack to try picking the lock before Richie, being Richie, asks why they don’t just break a window – and Bill, being Bill, immediately takes him up on it.

Eddie guesses it doesn’t matter, if it’s only for one night, but he still winds up enlisting Mike to help him drag a bookshelf over to cover up the glass and keep the worst of the rain out.

They turn the place upside-down looking for signs of recent habitation and find none. Just the fruit starting to mold on the kitchen counter and the curdled milk in the fridge, both of which Eddie makes a point of throwing out in the garage. They hide the car there, too, and keep the lights down low.

Eddie is on his way back from his impromptu garbage disposal when he catches Richie on his way into one of the ground-floor bedrooms.

He stops when he sees Eddie, one hand braced against the wall beside a hideous abstract painting that looks it must have come from the darkest corners of an IKEA.

“How much do you wanna bet we’re all gonna get woken up by ghosts?”

“I’d tell you not to jinx it, but I think I already fucked that up myself,” Eddie says, crossing his arms in a less than convincing attempt to look like he isn’t beyond relieved to have Richie back where he can keep an eye on him. It’s been less than ten minutes. He’s not going to drop dead in less than ten minutes – right?

“Hey,” Richie says, and – yeah, Eddie must not have been very convincing at all, because Richie’s voice has gone soft and earnest, an even gentler version of every time he’s dropped everything to remind Eddie what he’s capable of.

“I’m fine,” Eddie responds, only now he realizes he’s crying again. It’s annoying, because it makes it harder to see Richie as he steps away from the wall and kind of teeters for a moment, one hand extended awkwardly toward Eddie. 

Eddie blinks away the worst of the tears, which works, and tries to slow his breathing, which doesn’t. Richie looks like he has absolutely no idea what to do with either of his hands, and after a moment he stuffs them both back into his pockets almost guiltily.

“I’m fine, too,” Richie tells him.

“You’re not fucking fine, you – you could have died,” Eddie says brokenly, and he doesn’t  _ dare  _ say what he’s even more afraid of – that he still could. His vision blurs again, and he blinks several times before he just gives up on being able to see. He doesn’t even realize what Richie is doing until he’s all wrapped up in a hug and Eddie has to take a quick step back just to keep them both upright.

Richie mumbles an apology into Eddie’s hair; it makes Eddie’s breath catch in his throat. 

“And let you guys have all this fun without me?” Richie says after a moment.

It takes Eddie an embarrassingly long time to find his voice again. “Yeah, it’s a real fucking pleasure.”

Richie laughs, and for a moment all Eddie can think is that he wants him to do it again.

“So,” Richie says, “what, are you gonna go camp out in the living room with the college kid?”

“Not unless you are, too,” Eddie huffs, trying not to seem too disappointed when Richie finally pulls away.

He doesn’t expect him to look so surprised.

“What? Someone has to keep an eye on you, and it – it might as well be me, right?” But Richie’s expression just goes from surprised to uncomfortable, and Eddie finally realizes something he should have realized over an hour ago.

He does his best to backtrack.

“U-unless you think it’ll make it harder to sleep. Obviously you’re gonna need a lot of rest – which you probably already knew, right?” He forces a laugh and thinks about turning and leaving before he can make a bigger ass of himself, but something stops him. He’s left with nothing to do but fill the silence with more words. “If I’m – I don’t know, smothering you, I get that. I don’t even blame you for getting annoyed, and you know any of the Losers would be happy to pop in a few times to make sure you’re okay. It doesn’t have to be me, and honestly a couch is still a huge improvement over a bunch of dirt and shit”—

“Eddie.”

Eddie takes a deep breath and looks at Richie, or rather at the crack in the lower corner of his glasses. He feels bad about that, too, but at least Richie’d kept this pair just in case something happened to the spare. Like getting hit in the head by a ton of glass and broken shelving units.

“It’s up to you,” Eddie finishes, lamely, like he hasn’t spent the better part of the evening making all the calls for Richie. The thought of it makes him feel like he’s swallowed a bunch of rocks.

“You’re not annoying,” Richie mutters, and then he scrubs a hand through his hair and stares at the floor between them. “Uh – look, it’s just. There’s just the one bed.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Richie, I  _ just  _ helped Bill and Mike case every room in here. I asked everyone to make sure they left one of the ones down here open for you so you wouldn’t fall down the stairs and hit your head  _ again.” _

Richie grins. “Maybe this time it’ll knock some sense into me.”

“Doubt it,” Eddie retorts. Richie’s stupid smile is both contagious and reassuring.

“Thanks, though. I didn’t just forget that, right?”

“Not that,” Eddie reassures him. “You were resting down here, pretty sure that was all upstairs.”

“Right,” Richie sighs, “okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, you can bunk with me. You’re definitely gonna wind up wishing you’d taken the couch when I steal all your covers, though.”

Eddie rolls his eyes; he remembers Richie doing that pretty much every time they fell asleep playing video games or watching awful straight-to-video horror movies, but if it couldn’t deter him back then, of course it isn’t going to now.

“You sure?” he checks anyway.

“Yeah, if you promise to shower first.” Richie pinches the bridge of his nose, then, and in an exaggeratedly nasally voice announces that he smells  _ much  _ worse than the zombies.

Eddie shoves at him, cheeks burning. “You’re just as bad, asshole! And this is  _ your  _ fucking…  _ fluids _ all over me!”

“Hey, I’m gravely injured, you have to be gentle!” Richie complains. He’s clearly joking, although he actually does have to brace himself against the wall behind him to avoid losing his balance; Eddie isn’t immediately remorseful, per se, but he does feel a little twinge of guilt all the same.

“I will be,” Eddie promises, “when you stop being so annoying.”

“Oh, so now I’m the annoying one,” Richie retorts, but he’s still smiling, and he doesn’t complain when Eddie insists on walking him down the hall to the bathroom. He  _ does _ try to argue that Eddie should have the first shower – not because he reeks, but because they both know Eddie would probably give his right arm for a five-minute shower in literal snowmelt – but Eddie insists on that, too. He wants to make sure Richie gets to the hot water before it runs out, and he can already hear someone running the shower upstairs.

In the meantime, Eddie gets Richie’s permission to rifle through his backpack for a set of clean clothes, then sits and waits with them outside the bathroom door – just in case.

He doesn’t realize how pathetic he probably looks until Mike happens past on his way back to the kitchen. He’s carrying several empty water bottles.

Actually, Eddie scares the shit out of him first, huddled on the floor in the weak half-light that’s trickling out from under the door. His thoughts are such a mess that he doesn’t even notice Mike is there until he hears his startled gasp, followed by a shaky exhale and,  _ “Eddie?”  _

Eddie jumps a little, then goes straight from alarm to self-consciousness. 

“Uh – hey.”

He can vaguely see Mike cast a curious glance at the door across from Eddie. “Richie’s showering?”

Eddie doesn’t think he likes his undertone, like Mike knows something he doesn’t, but it’s easy enough to ignore. “Yeah, I guess even he does that sometimes.”

“I can hear you!” Richie calls. 

“Good for you!” Eddie calls back. He hardly cares how childish it sounds.

Mike chuckles. “I’m surprised you let him go first.”

Eddie tries and fails not to sound offended. “He’s hurt.”

“And getting to shower with hot water could be the difference between life or death,” Richie says, louder this time.

“Better than shocking your system with something cold,” Eddie mutters. He’s not sure if Richie even hears it.

Mike shuffles the bottles to one arm, but doesn’t actually do anything with his newly-freed hand except fidget with one of the lids. He’s a lot quieter about it when he says, “He’s in pretty good hands.”

“He should be in a hospital,” Eddie says, matching Mike’s volume.

“Yeah, or with a doctor. But at least he’s not alone.”

“I don’t think he’ll be on board with that when I get out the needle and thread,” Eddie sighs. It has to be done, but he’s dreading it so much that he’s already considered asking Beverly to do it several times. She can sew, but none of them missed the sound of her crying interspersed with Ben’s voice, even all the way down here. He can’t ask, and if it can’t be her then it should be Eddie.

“On board with what?” Richie wonders, startling both of them all over again when his voice doesn’t come through muffled by the sound of running water and a closed door. Eddie looks up to see him standing in the doorway with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist.

It nearly gives him a fucking heart attack.

He all but lurches to his feet, accidentally knocking a bottle loose from Mike’s grip in the process, and unceremoniously shoves the bundle of clothes at Richie. 

“Would you fucking  _ please  _ make yourself decent first?” he hisses, going to push Richie back into the steamy bathroom and then thinking better of it when the heat radiating off of Richie’s still-damp skin seems to rush straight up Eddie’s arms to his cheeks. Richie takes the clothes from him, anyway, looking half-bewildered and somehow also infuriatingly amused.

Mike is even  _ more  _ amused. He picks up the fallen bottle before Eddie can remember to and continues on down the hall.

Over his shoulder, he calls, “Try not to kill each other, guys.”

_ He’s killing me,  _ Eddie wants to say, but that, he realizes, might sound too much like an admission.

There’s still plenty of hot water left when Eddie gets his turn, but he chooses to take his shower cold, anyway, and he resolutely does  _ not _ think about why he can’t seem to convince himself that he’s doing it all in the name of leaving enough for everyone else. 

By the time he’s finished getting cleaned up, shaved and dressed, he feels more settled. It doesn’t take him all that long by his standards, but he still comes back to his and Richie’s bedroom to find Richie passed out on top of the covers. His stomach gives an uneasy lurch at the sight, but the longer he watches from the doorway, the easier it is to be reassured by the steady rise and fall of Richie’s breathing – and the harder it is to look away. 

He’s handsome, even all scruffy and with his still-damp hair sticking up all over the place.

At least indoors, the fact that he also sleeps with his mouth hanging open doesn’t mean he could swallow bugs in his sleep. 

Eddie kind of hates to wake him up, but the stitches can’t wait until morning. He decides to wake him gently, by lowering himself onto the bed beside him and resting a hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t even shake him, just kind of sits there feeling Richie’s warmth soak into his palm. If he really concentrates, he can even feel the steady beat of Richie’s heart.

“Eds?”

Eddie jerks his hand back to his side, feeling for the second time tonight like he’s been caught red-handed – except this time he kind of has, and he doesn’t have words strong enough for how relieved he is that Richie decides not to mention it, if he notices anything at all.

“Hey, Rich, um – I still need to stitch up your forehead,” Eddie says in a rush, and then he winces. “Sorry.”

Richie sits up with obvious reluctance. “You’re the doctor.”

“I’m really not,” Eddie laments. He doesn’t know what else to say, because he doesn’t have much to offer Richie that’s likely to make this more comfortable, and they both know it. Finally, he settles on a sheepish, “Are you okay with needles?”

“Oh, I love them,” Richie responds sarcastically. “Let’s just get this over with so we can both get some sleep.”

“Okay,” Eddie says softly. He goes back to collect both his first-aid kit and the second, much smaller pack he’d grabbed more or less on a whim. 

“I guess I shouldn’t’ve made fun of you for picking that up,” Richie comments as Eddie pops open the suture kit and skims the instruction manual as casually as possible. Richie doesn’t look particularly reassured despite his efforts. “Why are all the needles curved?”

“Because, it’s…”

“You don’t know,” Richie accuses.

“Shut up, it’s probably because it’s, uh, easier,” Eddie mutters, carefully unwrapping one of the packets of sterile thread.

“Has anyone ever told you your bedside manner fucking sucks?”

“No one who lived to tell about it,” Eddie says ominously. Richie snorts.

He’s unexpectedly good about holding still through the worst of the actual stitching, but he doesn’t shut up for more than a second at a time – when he’s not sucking in sharp breaths and blinking back reflexive tears. Eddie does his best to be quick; at the very least, he has his steady hands going for him. If only injuries and illnesses and the insides of doctor’s offices didn’t freak him out so much, he really might’ve made a good surgeon.

“I’m gonna look like fucking Frankenstein’s monster,” Richie whines as Eddie finally finishes up and moves on to preparing a fresh gauze pad.

“You already looked like that,” he says offhandedly. He doesn’t bother pointing out that the stitches look pretty neat, in his opinion. Richie can probably tell he’s a little proud of them, anyway.

Richie looks inordinately delighted by the insult, but he doesn’t actually respond until Eddie’s finished putting away all his tools and come back with a fresh bottle of water and a couple of granola bars. 

It’s not really a response at all so much as it’s a quiet acknowledgment of something they’re both thinking.

“It really is weird being here, you know? Just barging into someone else’s house.”

“I doubt they even miss this place,” Eddie says, remembering the family photos lining one of the walls upstairs. They’d stood out because they were the only really personal things in the whole house. “It’s fucking soulless.”

“Do you?”

“Huh?”

Richie’s eyes drop to the water bottle in his hands. “Do you miss your place?”

“Oh,” Eddie says. He watches Richie peel at the label on the bottle. Richie doesn’t look at him again until he clears his throat and says, “Not really.”

“Oh,” Richie echoes. “I bet it’s cleaner.”

“That’s a nice way of saying it’s”—Eddie almost stops himself, but instead he just stumbles over the second half of his sentence—“like the inside of a hospital.”

It makes it sound too honest, like he might as well have just said something about his wife, after all.

He doesn’t let Richie keep the conversation going any further than that; he just gulps down the last of his unsatisfying granola bar and then practically bolts out of the room to brush his teeth.

This time, when he comes back, Richie is still awake, although he’s settled in under the covers and looks plenty exhausted.

“Hey,” he says, “sorry.”

Eddie shrugs. “It’s nothing, Rich. I just”—don’t know how to talk about it? Don’t  _ want  _ to talk about it? Have no idea what to even say?

Richie hums like he understands something, but not the same something Mike seemed to. Eddie thinks, a little sullenly, that he’d  _ love  _ for his friends to share some of their brilliant insights into his psyche with him.

“Go to sleep, Richie.”

“Aw, you’re not gonna kiss it better?” Richie mumbles drowsily with a big, dopey grin on his face.

Eddie doesn’t know what possesses him in that moment.

Maybe it’s just that stupid smile on Richie’s face, the charming little crinkle at the corners of his eyes, the fact that he’s here at all to crack jokes and hog too much of the bed they’re sharing, just the two of them, alone and, finally, in the dark, but no sooner has he flicked off the bedside lamp than he rolls over to press a kiss to Richie’s forehead, right beside the bandaged stretch of skin, so he can be sure Richie will feel it.

And then – because he’s feeling brave and so, so stupid – another, even gentler than the last, to the raised bump a little higher up. 


	5. All He'd Have To Do is Ask

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long time no update! I think the... _content_ of chapters a few updates down the line will have me writing a little faster since I've had some of That planned since before I started this story, but regardless I swear I'm trying to move back toward a nice regular post schedule! 
> 
> Also, the chapter total I've added to this fic is still a very very loose estimate; this chapter was meant to include two more POV sections before I deemed that too long and split it up, but then the plot of this fic has always been a loose one and nothing too drawn-out or complicated. In theory!

His babylove makes this strangers’ house feel as much like home as their house in Atlanta. She tells him that climbing into bed beside him – any bed, anyplace – makes her feel like all’s right with the world, like it isn’t ending at all. It’s a lot of things, the way she says it. It’s an admission with a hint of guilt, and it’s an open declaration of love with all its attendant joy. It’s a quiet expression of gratitude for the luck they’ve had. And it’s the beginning of a story.

That story begins at night, hours after a serene phone call linked Stan’s townhouse room to the hotel Patty spent the night in. Because her equally last-minute flight to Derry happened to land too late for a drive in the dark – or too late for two people who had no idea how limited their time really was, anyway.

When she fell asleep, she tells him, the handful of days ahead of them stretched on as endless as any childhood summer. She says she fell asleep with his voice in her head, and when she woke up, it had gone silent. And that was how she knew something was wrong.

Stanley remembers that second call, too. He remembers it because if Patty hadn’t woken him up, then he might not have gotten up to look out the window as he did his best to comfort her. He might never have seen the street writhing like a pool of eels, dark water rising. He might not have seen the half-formed limbs and exposed organs of creatures that looked like they shouldn’t have been alive bobbing just beneath the surface.

(But they were.)

And he might not have woken the others up in a panic, which might have meant the end of the story then and there.

He tells her about how they got out, and she tells him about her pre-dawn rush to pack her things, get the rental car and start toward Derry. Some of it, he’d overheard as it happened, but beyond the collapse of Derry’s cell network, everything Patty tells him is new. It’s a relief to fill in the blanks, just to share it. 

“I’m so glad you weren’t alone,” she says after a choked-up description of the scattered news reports that made it onto the radio. It was a wave of increasingly strange incidents, and she was rushing forward to meet it, joined in every direction by a confused mass of drivers seeking escape or refuge and not knowing where to look for it.

But Patty knew. Stanley knew.

“We stick together,” he answers, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. “I didn’t even have to ask for help finding you. You know they probably already think of you as one of us? They probably did, before, too.”

Patty laughs, surprised. “But I’ve hardly spoken to everyone.”

Stanley just smiles, trailing a hand through her hair. He hopes the rest of the Losers all know how important what they did today is to the both of them. If it weren’t so obvious that Richie’s really enjoying Eddie’s constant attention, Stan would probably be down there waiting on him instead. It’d be the very least he could do.

He still might, if they manage to get completely sick of each other before Richie’s feeling better – a very big _if,_ anyway. Stan considers googling how long concussion recovery is supposed to take, but then he remembers that his phone is still in his pants pocket, and besides that, it’s probably been dead for a while, at long last. 

And he’s maybe not _quite_ grateful enough to disentangle himself from Patty just yet.

“They’re all good people,” he tells her. Maybe the best people he’s ever known, them and the love of his life. He would say that, too, but she looks so quietly delighted that he’s not sure he needs to.

She’ll fit right in, he thinks. 

“I know,” she says. “They’re your friends,” like that explains everything. “It’ll be nice, getting to know them all.”

They let that moment stretch comfortably, drifting nearer to sleep all the while, and Stan knows it’s because they both want the parts that don’t hurt to last. He doesn’t know if Patty needs to get the part about stopping in that small-town supermarket off her chest, or if it’s better not to let it be the last thing they talk about before settling in to dream. He waits patiently for her to decide, content to soak up her warmth in the meantime.

He’s missed it.

Finally, she says, “I didn’t really mean to stop there.”

“In Gardiner?”

“Yes. I was just so tired, and I wasn’t paying enough attention… I wound up on the exit ramp, and things looked safe enough. I was a little low on gas, and then the store was so close, I thought maybe if I hurried I could get some things for everyone. Some water, at the very least.”

Stanley hugs her a little tighter as she tells him about the close call she had in the parking lot, walking from her car to the front entrance and only narrowly avoiding getting bitten thanks to the swift intervention of the man who would later introduce himself as Ralph Lloyd. He hadn’t been bitten, either, then, but he had helped a whole handful of people make it safely inside just as the violence was kicking off.

It’s hard to reconcile that image with the man Stanley met today. It wasn’t just that he was sick and exhausted; it was the resignation. The blank apathy.

“What happened to him?” he asks.

Patty shakes her head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right, dismissing it as just giving up. I know I didn’t know him that well, but it was like he lost something even before he ever got bitten. You could tell he was different.”

“We’ve seen things like that,” Stanley admits. Not just the violent ones, like the man in red or the casually brutal destruction they’d so narrowly dodged in Derry. It makes a twisted kind of sense, really, that if those effects of Pennywise’s presence in Derry carried over to Its kids, so did the lethargic disinterest in a person’s surroundings. The ability to watch someone get hurt without batting an eye or lifting a finger.

“Do you know how to fix it?” Patty asks him when he finishes explaining, as best he can, the blind eye people always seemed to turn to everything that was so deeply wrong about his hometown. And about the thing that caused it, in more detail this time.

None of it makes any sense even now, so his explanation is pretty scattered.

Stan pauses, chewing on the question. “Maybe Mike would know, but – except for killing It, I don’t think so.”

“And that might be hard with so many of them,” Patty says lightly, looking deflated. Stan loves her deeply, madly, for being able to imply that it wouldn’t be _impossible._

“Why do you ask?”

Patty sighs, giving his hand a little squeeze under the covers. “It’s Oliver.”

“The kid?” 

“He’s twenty-three, Stanley,” Patty says with a little smile. “He’s hardly a kid. But…”

“Young enough.”

“Young enough,” Patty agrees. “And he’s changed, too.”

Stan considers that. In the midst of all the confusion and then, of course, the elation of finally reuniting with his wife, he’d let it slip his mind, sort of, but it’s true that their youngest companion is quiet. Maybe too much so.

“He could be in shock?” he offers. While not _good,_ it’s still a lot better than being brainwashed by alien monsters. It wouldn’t even be abnormal; they’re all more than a little shaken, and with good reason.

“I hope that’s all it is,” Patty says quietly. “But if it isn’t, we’ve got to help, somehow. There must be something.”

“There’s eight of us, we can figure something out,” Stanley says. It’s bizarrely easy to believe it, too. The more of them there are, the more there is to lose if anything goes wrong; today is proof enough of that – but it also means being more well-supported and well-protected than anyone could hope to be with the world falling apart around them.

Patty’s eyes slip shut and she smiles, sleepier now with the rain pattering gently against the windows and the covers rustling as Stan helps them both get into a more comfortable position. 

“Do you want me to turn the light off?” he asks, pausing with one hand extended toward it, caught between the twin not-quite-right feelings of wanting to be able to _see_ and knowing it’ll be harder to sleep that way.

“It’s up to you,” Patty says. “You’re here. I’m okay.”

Stanley has to blink back tears, but then he rushes to flick off the bedside lamp and settle back in with his arms wrapped tight around his babylove. 

“I love you,” he whispers into the soft skin of her throat. Her hair tickles his face. He can feel her laugh, a nearly silent tremor against his lips.

“I love you, too, Stanley.”

They fall asleep like that, leaving both their stories unfinished in favor of the comfortable assurance that everything will work out, one way or another, for as long as it needs to. Side-by-side, freshly showered, safe and warm for the first time in what feels like forever, that feeling lingers until the next morning, when they wake up and learn that Oliver has gone missing from the living room downstairs.

-*-

Bill wakes up in someone’s arms and knows immediately that it can’t be Audra.

Actually, it’s not so much that he knows who it _isn’t,_ but that he knows who it _is_ and appreciates the difference. _Basks_ in it, even.

He’s not too drowsy to forget it’s Mikey he fell asleep with, but he is maybe too drowsy to feel guilty about how happy it makes him, opening his eyes to his friend’s sleeping face.

Mike’s arm is draped lazily over Bill’s body. He’s not holding him, really, so maybe he just happened to throw an arm out as he rolled over in the night, and Bill just happened to be there. And he just happened to not be startled awake by it, and Mike just happened to stay like that despite the seeming discomfort of the position.

Bill breaks into a grin when Mike finally opens his eyes. He doesn’t move his arm, and Bill doesn’t pretend he wasn’t staring, memorizing all the little ways Mike’s face has changed in twenty-odd years. He’s aged a lot better than Bill has, anyway; if you asked a total stranger, Bill’s pretty sure they’d assume he has a few years on Mike.

“Morning already?” Mike complains. His voice is sleep-rough; it makes Bill’s come out bubbly when he responds.

“There’s no r-rule saying we can’t j-just go back to sleep.”

“And miss this chance to have coffee made in an actual kitchen? No way.”

Bill laughs, and Mike still doesn’t take his arm back. Maybe just to delay the inevitable, Bill offers to get the coffee, and then he doesn’t move, either.

A slow smile spreads across Mike’s face. “This morning, or…?”

“Oh, I-I can’t,” Bill says, poking gently at Mike’s arm. Teasing, or maybe daring.

Mike doesn’t look contrite or surprised or much of anything, really, that would clue Bill in as to whether or not he was already aware of their cuddling.

 _Are_ they cuddling? Can that even happen accidentally?

He gets half an answer when Mike drags him in for a clumsy little half-embrace instead of just pulling away. He holds it, too, with his nose and lips pressed to the top of Bill’s head and his breath gusting warm through Bill’s hair. He hadn’t even realized he was cold until just now.

“Must be nice,” Mike says, and it’s jarring how sad he sounds now that Bill can’t see his face. “Waking up like this every morning.”

“I don’t,” Bill blurts. “I mean, I did – I have.”

“It’s okay,” Mike says, “I’m glad you got to have that. Some of you, at least.”

There are so many things that Bill could say to _that_ that for a moment he can’t get a single one of them out, like a traffic jam on the tip of his tongue. It doesn’t feel right, answering Mike’s earnestness with anything about how long it's been since Bill and Audra shared a room, let alone a bed. He _did_ get to have it, whatever exactly ‘it’ is that also exists between himself and Mikey. He just lost it somewhere along the way.

Finally, he says, “Y-you should have had it t-too, Mikey.”

Mike snorts softly. “I did, here and there. Nothing serious, but that’s okay. Relationships have never been a priority, I guess.”

That comes as a surprise; Bill perks up a little, and the fingers he’d brought up to brush at the soft fabric of Mike’s shirt go still. “R-really? Who?”

“Oh,” Mike laughs, a little nervous. “Guys passing through, mostly. You know Derry – not a lot of locals looking to mingle, and everything had to be pretty hush-hush anyway.”

“Guys,” Bill notes, resuming his exploration of the expanse of Mike’s chest. He kind of feels like he’s already found what he’s looking for, although he’s also not sure that he knows what that is. “Y-you never said you w-were gay.”

“You never asked,” Mike says with a shrug. He goes very still, so after a moment Bill follows suit.

“That sounds tough, t-too, Mikey,” Bill murmurs when Mike doesn’t say anything else – just tilts his head so only his chin is still nestled in Bill’s hair. 

“Sure, it was,” Mike sighs.

“Thank you. F-for making so m-many sacrifices for us.”

“Don’t mention it,” Mike says. “But like I said, it just wasn’t a priority – finding a guy. A partner. You can’t sacrifice something you don’t have, right?”

“W-what if you do have it, though?” Bill wonders aloud before he can think better of it.

Mike finally moves back a few inches to scrutinize Bill’s face. Bill has no idea what he sees there, except that his smile is still a little forlorn when he finally replies, “You mean like how you have a wife?”

Bill swallows. “Uh – uh, well, k-kind of, but back in – in Derry, she”—

He’s cut off, as bad luck would have it, by a knock at the door that puts them both on instant high alert. 

Ben’s voice comes through loud and clear despite the wall between them. “Bill, Mike – have you seen the kid?”

“The one who was with Patty?” Mike checks, glancing back at Bill.

“Oliver,” Bill recalls, and he’s already halfway out of bed by the time he raises his voice and says, “We just w-woke up. Is everything o-o-okay?”

He pulls the door open to find Ben standing in his pajamas, looking – not panicked, but concerned. The way people look when a newfound problem hasn’t quite sunk in yet, when it seems like an easy solution could still put an end to it before anything has to get serious.

Bill doesn’t think he’ll be needing that coffee, after all.

He beats Ben and Mike to the living room. The couch is empty, of course, but that’s not what draws Bill’s attention first; the front door is standing open, too, and must have been for some time if the sodden rug and long pool of rainwater is anything to go by. The pillow they’d brought out for Oliver to use is lying in a heap on the floor, and the shape the blankets are in implies a much more restless night than Bill or Mike had, albeit not for lack of things to have nightmares about.

Mike catches Bill by the wrist before he can bolt out the front door. 

“Let’s check with everyone else first, okay?”

Bill wavers for a moment, but it’s so hard to say no to Mike when he asks for anything with that pleading look on his face. Plus, they’ve got to stick together. Bill knows that, even if he does forget easily in heated moments. It helps to have Mike there to remind him.

Ben jogs back to the stairs. “I’ll go talk to Stan and Patty.”

Which leaves Richie and Eddie. Bill takes the lead, but he’s grateful to Mike for hanging so close to him that he can still feel the ghost of his warmth prickling mere inches from his skin. 

Bill knocks, maybe too hard, and nearly panics when he doesn’t hear an answer after several beats. Mike opens the door before Bill can – an odd feature of this house, that most of the bedrooms don’t have locks – and then stops short with his other arm extended to hold Bill back, too.

Richie and Eddie are right where they should be, miraculously still fast asleep despite the intrusion. Bill can’t help feeling a little jealous. They’re not just wrapped up in each other’s arms; they’re fully tangled up in each other and the blankets, Eddie with his head tucked against Richie’s shoulder, and Richie’s hand cradling it the way Bill did with Mike in the truck.

“Almost hate to wake them up,” Mike murmurs. Bill expects him to still be looking at their friends when he glances up at him, but their eyes meet instead.

“We could l-let them rest a little longer,” he suggests. “Th-they probably know less than we do, anyway.”

Mike smiles, gently closing the door without another word. It occurs to Bill that it might behoove them to check on Richie, but the thought of anything being seriously wrong with him seems so out of place in that scene that he disregards it just as fast. Besides, there’s no way Eddie wouldn’t have been waking him up to check on him all through the night, and probably more often than was strictly necessary at that.

Bill hears several sets of footsteps on the stairs. Everyone pauses in the living room for a moment; Mike catches Bill by the elbow and guides him in that direction.

Patty and Stan meet them halfway. Patty peers past Mike’s broad shoulders on down the hall, while Stan gives them both a searching look.

“Are they okay? Bill?”

“They’re fine,” Bill and Mike say at once. When that only elicits another concerned-slash-confused look, Mike adds, “They’re asleep. We thought we should probably let Richie get as much rest as he can.”

He doesn’t mention Eddie, but when Bill opens his mouth to do just that, Mike elbows him gently, and Bill stops, considerably more confused than Stan seems to be.

Stan smiles. Patty still looks worried, but something like comprehension crosses her features for a moment nonetheless.

“Let’s let them sleep, then,” she says, already turning back to the living room.

Someone’s closed the front door in the meantime, and now everyone’s standing in their pajamas looking overwhelmed and, in Beverly’s case, not much less exhausted than she did last night. Ben is staring at her and hardly seems to notice when the four of them reappear. It’s Beverly who frowns, scanning the dark hallway behind them for two more who never come.

“Richie and Eddie?” she says. It comes out stilted, like she’d wanted to say something like “too” and couldn’t get it out.

“N-no, they’re okay, they’re just s-sleeping, still,” Bill reassures her. 

She relaxes, sighing softly when Ben reaches for her hand.

“Shouldn’t we wake them up?” he wonders.

“If we do, we’ll spend the rest of the day listening to Eddie explain how big a difference twenty minutes of sleep makes when you’ve got a concussion,” Stan warns. 

Beverly smiles a little weakly. “For all we know, it could. How about we leave someone here to fill them in when they’re up?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go with you to find him,” Patty says immediately. 

Bill nods. “B-Beverly, do you wanna s-sit this one out?”

Bev glances up at Ben, worrying at her lower lip. She doesn’t say anything for a long moment; Bill doesn’t know exactly what passes unspoken between the two of them, but when she finally returns her attention to the rest of the group, she’s already nodding. “Ben and I charged our phones overnight. I can keep in touch with him from here.”

It doesn’t take them long to situate themselves in the car. Mike takes the driver’s seat without a word, and Bill sits beside him. He keeps thinking about Richie and Eddie curled against each other, and Beverly’s hand in Ben’s, and the steadying hand Stan keeps on Patty’s shoulder and arm and all the murmured reassurances he offers her the longer and further they drive with no sign of Oliver. No more open doors, no muddy footprints, no zombies. 

He hates knowing that something happened here – had to have, for it to be so thoroughly void of human life or any of its telltale signs – and more than that, he hates not knowing what it was. There’s not a board out of place anywhere; it’s like a movie set. In fact, it’s even more artificial and sterile than that. 

He watches Mike’s hands on the steering wheel just to break up the monotony of block after block of manicured suburban houses. Derry never had the kind of money for places like this, and the parts of L.A. Bill sees the most of have either too much or too little.

He wonders if the tips of Mike’s fingers are still as calloused now as they were when they were younger, before he moved off the farm and into the center of town.

He thinks that he should have paid more attention to those little details when he had the chance.

They cover every inch of road in the neighborhood multiple times, plus a generously wide radius surrounding it. Mike exchanges looks with Bill more and more the further they go; they both know they should have seen Oliver by now, even if he’d been walking or running most of the night. 

But to or from what, exactly?

Finally, Patty says, “Maybe he just moved to another house.”

“Even with eight of us, it’ll take a while to search them all,” Mike says, but he’s already turning them back around. 

“Then we’d better get started,” Stanley answers.

“Richie and Eddie are up,” Ben interjects. “They didn’t hear anything, either. Actually”—he pauses, typing something and waiting a moment for Beverly’s response. “Eddie says he might’ve. He woke up a lot through the night. One time it was, uh… because something startled him, _maybe,_ but he wasn’t awake enough to be sure.”

“H-how is he feeling?” Bill asks. He forgets to specify that he means Richie, not Eddie, but maybe the clarification isn’t necessary.

Ben grimaces. “She says not much different. His head hurts.”

“I have some Tylenol,” Patty offers. “Would that be okay?”

“Eddie will probably kn-know,” Bill guesses. “It – it’s better than Advil, right?”

“That sounds right,” Stan says.

Things go quiet again after that, and Bill lets his attention drift back to the scattered trees and buildings rushing past. Mike’s speeding is a lot easier to handle than Stan’s, never mind Eddie’s, and he’s only doing it now that they’re all semi-reasonably sure they won’t be going too fast to catch sight of anything important. 

There are several towels laid out by the door when they get back – Eddie’s idea, if Bill had to guess. Richie’s voice carries from the kitchen, where they find him and Beverly perched on a couple of bar stools at the counter. Eddie is standing over the stove with his back to them. He’s busy shuffling around several frying pans and a bowl of something that’s either pancake batter or scrambled eggs.

There’s a cutting board sitting off to the side with a few small piles of chopped vegetables spread across it, though, so unless Eddie’s idea of pancakes is both unique and vaguely unappetizing, it’s probably eggs.

“…might be able to find you something to wear before you run out of _not_ -blood-soaked shirts,” Richie is saying animatedly. 

“You remember that?” Eddie says. “I didn’t keep them. Obviously. Ugh. But – you remember that?”

Richie pauses; Bill can’t see his face, but he sounds a little more hesitant all of a sudden. “Uh, yeah, bits and pieces. The ride down here’s a little clearer.”

Richie catches sight of Bill herding the rest of their group into the kitchen and perks up almost immediately, grinning over his shoulder. “Hey! Hope everyone’s hungry, because Eddie’s definitely gonna make you guys eat some of this either way.”

“It’s optional,” Eddie denies, turning and toweling off his hands. “I’m not that great at cooking, so”—

“Bullshit, it looks great.”

“It’s a bowl of raw eggs,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes. 

“I thought you were gonna cook it,” Beverly says with a smile. Ben and Richie both look delighted by the joke; Ben shows it by coming up and looping an arm around her waist. She cranes her neck up to kiss his cheek, and Bill finds himself looking at Mike again. At his hands, at his mouth.

Mike catches him looking, and for several beats they hold that moment between them like it’s a living thing.

“No luck?” he hears Eddie ask. There’s a smile on his face, too, but his brows are drawn up in concern. Bill figures he already knows the answer to that question, but the tension of it is still hanging over the room, unignorable. _Someone_ had to address it directly.

“No,” Patty says. “Not yet.”

“N-not yet,” Bill repeats.

“Did he have a phone on him?” Beverly asks. Ben is still draped loosely over her. She’s moved on to tracing slow circles against the back of his hand.

Richie shrugs. “Doesn’t everyone his age?”

“It broke,” Patty says. “Right at the start.”

“iPhones,” Richie laments.

Eddie shoots him an incredulous look. “Dude, seriously?”

“Mad because yours was an iPhone too, aren’t you”—

“Who cares! Phones break!”

“Guys,” Bill finally interrupts. He doesn’t have to say anything else to get everyone’s attention, Richie and Eddie’s included. “If w-we’re gonna find Oliver, we n-need to be quick about it. So let’s just focus on eating and then g-get started again, okay?”

“What if he doesn’t want to be found?” Richie asks. “I mean, what if we freaked him out yesterday?”

Bill and Mike exchange a grim look, but Bill thinks maybe Mike’s is a little grimmer – or just more pained. He thinks he knows exactly what’s eating at him, and it takes every ounce of self control he has not to talk him down from it on the spot.

Neither of them has a chance to answer before Patty says, “It’s too strange, the way he just left. But if he wants us to leave him alone, we can… we can talk it over, once we’ve made sure he’s okay.”

Richie smiles. “Can’t argue with that.”

No one has to say much of anything else. A few of them look to Bill for confirmation, but while he offers it in the form of an acquiescent nod, he doubts there’s any real question; they’ll do their best to help, just like they always have and hopefully always will.

“Do you need a hand with any of this?” Stan offers, gesturing vaguely at the pans and half-prepped food behind Eddie. It’s a gentle change of topic, for the moment at least.

Eddie shrugs and steps aside to make room for one more by the stove. 

“Hey, how come Stan the Man gets to help but I don’t?” Richie complains, mock-offended and at least semi-genuinely jealous.

“Because no one wants your blood in their breakfast, asshole!”

“Blood?” Ben asks, looking mildly alarmed.

Richie holds his right hand up like a trophy. There’s a fresh Band-Aid wrapped around his pointer finger, but that’s all. A minor casualty of an earlier attempt to help, presumably. 

“It’s just a little extra iron, Eds, like a vitamin,” he says. 

“That’s fucking disgusting,” Eddie tells him.

“Seconded,” Stan agrees, but he also shoots Richie a grateful look when Patty laughs and takes a seat beside Beverly. 

“This is bullying,” Richie announces, crossing his arms on his chest and smiling at Stan in particular. “It’s not my fault I have whatever the adult version of shaken baby syndrome is.”

“A concussion,” Eddie grouses. “Actually – no, you’re right, it’s just shaken baby syndrome. You're just lucky you have a convenient excuse for your shitty hand-eye coordination.”

“See? He’s so mean to me!”

That gets another laugh out of Patty, which gets one out of Stan, and so on until they’re all laughing, even Mike, whose laughter is as contagious as his wide, beautiful smile, perfect teeth, dimples, head tossed slightly back for even the most muted chuckle.

Bill would do anything for him, he thinks. Anything at all, and all he’d have to do is ask.


	6. But It's a Slow, Uphill Trip

The first time Beverly wakes up, breathless with fear, from a nightmare that was somehow more vivid than the real thing, she lets force of habit drive her out of bed with one hand clamped over her mouth; it doesn’t do much to stifle the noise she makes when something catches her by her free wrist before she can get both feet on the floor.

The grip doesn’t register as gentle to her fear-choked mind until the voice that accompanies it manages to filter in through the fog in her head, and by then Ben’s already taken her jerking back as his cue to let go. 

“Beverly. Bev, it’s just me. Hey. Are you okay?”

“Ben,” she says. It comes out sounding so strangled that it’s almost a whisper. “I’m sorry, I thought you…” She shakes her head and does her best to relax some of the tension in her muscles. Deep breaths. Don’t think about it.

The bed shakes a little beneath her, the flimsy metal frame protesting Ben’s shifting around. He finally settles in beside her, but he doesn’t touch her again. Beverly doesn’t know if that makes her feel better, or worse.

“Nightmares?” he guesses. 

“Memories.”

Ben nods; she can just make out his silhouette in the weak light filtering in around the curtains. It’s still dark out.

“Can I do anything?”

“I’ll take a hug,” Bev decides. She hates that she waits an extra long time before she says it, half afraid she’s about to be snapped at for being unappreciative, for hiding any details at all…

Ben waits, too, and for a moment it’s just confusing, but he happily reciprocates when Beverly finally throws her arms around him, her throat tight and eyes burning. 

She falls asleep some time after the sobbing and shaking start, run their course and then subside. Her next nightmare finds her still wrapped up in Ben’s arms, but it’s a gentle hold, easy to roll out of. She tries, just to feel like she can. She doesn’t mean to wake him, but there’s something extra comforting about the way he takes it in stride. He doesn’t even push her to talk about it; she’s done that enough already to know that it won’t help, at least not now.

By the time morning rolls around, Beverly is positive Ben never once fell back asleep before she did. It shows in the dark circles under his eyes, but not in the soft, concerned way he watches her get up and stretch several restless hours after sunrise, having finally given up on sleep.

He gets up, too, and Beverly pauses in the middle of raking a hand through her tangled hair.

“Don’t you want to sleep a little longer?”

“I’m okay,” Ben says. “I’m pretty sure all the adrenaline from yesterday still hasn’t worn off.”

Beverly snorts. “If we’re lucky, there won’t be as much of that today.”

Ben smiles. “I hope not. But it’d be good if you could take it easy, even if there is.”

Beverly doesn’t know what to say to that. If they need to make a trip out to scavenge food and supplies, she’d just as soon let Eddie stick around here with Richie – but then, it’s not like they can be sure it’ll stay safe here, either, so maybe having someone a little more combat-ready on hand  _ would  _ be good. That, or they’ll all stay in to rest and enjoy having an actual roof over their heads. 

Ben watches her mull that over, still smiling faintly. He comes up to her, eventually, and presses a tentative kiss to her cheek. She responds by pulling him in for a longer kiss on the lips; he leans in to help her reach, but she still has to balance on the tips of her toes to close the distance. 

“How’d you ever get to be so tall?” she wonders, laughing a little. It knocks something loose in her chest, as does Ben’s laughter in response. She feels it against her own mouth, warm and soft.

When they’ve settled back into a comfortable silence, Beverly adds, “It’d be better if we could  _ both  _ take it easy.”

“I wouldn’t say no to that,” Ben agrees. “Maybe next time I’ll try getting a concussion, too.”

“Well, there aren’t any meetings to cancel or deadlines to miss,” Beverly muses. “No need for a good excuse to do nothing, right?”

“Silver lining,” Ben chuckles. “Can’t do nothing on an empty stomach, though. How’s coffee sound to you?”

_ “Very  _ good.”

“Good,” Ben repeats, looking pleased as can be. “Just wait, I’ll be right back.”

He’s in such a rush to get to the Keurig that he actually has to slip back into the room just to ask her how she takes her coffee – not as important as the caffeine itself, but she’s always liked a hearty dose of sugar or honey. Sometimes cinnamon, if there is any; she’d had an office assistant years back who used to do that.

Tom always hated it. She still remembers the fight they’d had over it, if you could call it that – a fight. It was a little too one-sided, and it ended with her sweeping up the broken remains of a mug, but that was fine; she’d always hated that matching set.

She doesn’t tell Ben about all that. He tells her he’s never tried spicing up his coffee, and she doesn’t have time to suggest that he try it sometime; he’s already promising to come back with not one, but two cinnamon coffees. He looks, if anything, thrilled by the prospect of trying something new.

She doesn’t get to find out how he likes it until after he and the others get back from their impromptu car ride through the neighborhood. He tries to look unsure after the first few sips, but she’s pretty sure he’s just being polite. It makes her heart race, but Ben just smiles a little sheepishly when Richie rags on him for faking it and admits that, yeah, it’s not quite what he expected, but maybe some nutmeg would help balance the flavors.

He makes a sort of science experiment out of it. He even throws in a dash of dried ginger and laments the lack of unsweetened cocoa powder in the spice cabinet. It’s not a very well-stocked spice cabinet, but the coffee winds up being good, anyway.  _ Really  _ good. Beverly wishes she could go back, somehow, to tell her assistant about it. She would have loved it.

Bill suggests that they split into two groups of four to resume their search. Half of them will take the car a little farther out, while the other half will stay close to their home base. 

“Why not split into three or four?” Eddie wonders. “We’d cover a lot more ground that way.”

“It’s safer,” Mike says.

“M-more of us to l-look out for each other,” Bill explains. They can’t have anyone else disappearing, after all.

“Well, I’d like to look out for Richie,” Eddie says. He sounds like he expects some resistance, but Beverly would’ve assumed he’d want to stick close to Richie whether he’d actually said anything about it or not. The only person who looks at all surprised by the comment is Richie himself, but it’s the kind of surprised someone is when they’ve just been presented with an unexpected bouquet of flowers. 

What  _ is _ surprising is Richie’s failure to come back with a joke or playful little comment to deflect Eddie’s sincerity. He just ducks behind his own cup of coffee, which isn’t nearly enough to hide his widening smile. 

Beverly takes pity on him and volunteers herself and Ben for their group. Eddie agrees with an appreciative, albeit distracted, little nod. His eyes never leave Richie for very long, even after they’re all prepared with a makeshift lockpicking kit, a gun that feels a lot heavier now in Beverly’s hands, and the improvised weapons the others have been carrying around.

Richie teases Eddie for the smaller backpack he takes out with them, but Beverly doubts she’s the only one who’s gotten used to having basic necessities on them at all times – a few snacks, water, a first aid kit. Weapons.

Richie winds up swapping his bat out for the first walking stick-like object they come across. He does his level best to get a rise out of Eddie with several cartoonish impressions of old people, maybe because Eddie looks more and more concerned with every stumbling misstep and near-fall.

It  _ is  _ a little worrisome that they’ve hardly made it to the end of the block when Richie flops down on a couch and asks if they’d mind very much if he just watched the door this time. He looks genuinely exhausted, maybe even more so than Ben and Bev. 

Eddie agrees immediately, then hesitates, fidgeting uneasily with his wrench. 

Finally, he looks at Ben. “Could you stay with him? So we’re not leaving anyone alone?”

“Uh,” Ben says, exchanging a nonplussed look with Beverly. “Of course, yeah.”

Richie huffs but doesn’t bother complaining. He keeps his eyes closed, Beverly thinks a little too carefully.

It isn’t until they’re out of earshot upstairs that Eddie drifts over to the closet Beverly’s investigating – the floor of it is littered with clothes and empty hangers, the typical disarray of a teenager’s room – and says something too quiet for her to make out.

“Hm?”

“I said – I need advice.”

She turns to find him glaring at a book that apparently never managed to make it from the floor back into the bookshelf a few feet away. She can’t make out the title, and from where he’s standing she doubts Eddie can either.

“Is this about Richie?” she guesses.

Eddie lets out a shaky breath. “I think I should get a divorce.”

“Oh,” Beverly says, and for a moment all she can think about is that broken mug, the little cut it left on her pointer finger and the bristles of their hand broom soaking up enough coffee to drip back onto the floor.

“I mean I think I want one,” Eddie continues, visibly stressed. “Or – whatever the fuck you do when there aren’t any lawyers or fucking divorce courts…”

Beverly’s stomach twists, half in sympathy and half out of the pure dread that comes with thinking about her own husband. Anyone could see whatever Eddie has with his wife is just a different kind of bad for him.

“I’m assuming you aren’t asking me to recommend you one,” Beverly says, moving to the hastily made bed by the window and patting the spot beside her. Eddie wrinkles his nose at it, but accepts the invitation anyway, his movements stiff and uncomfortable.

He shakes his head after a moment. “No, I’m not.” He takes a deep breath, in and out, and then another before he continues, still not quite looking at her. “Obviously I kind of knew it wasn’t… good. But I think I really,  _ really  _ fucked up, marrying her.”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Beverly sighs. She would kill for a cigarette right now; she’s been craving one for days, but the past twenty-four hours have been particularly rough. If only she’d thought to grab more when she had the chance.

Eddie sighs, too. “Can I ask you something about that?”

“I won’t promise you an answer,” Beverly says, guarded. 

Eddie nods. “If we went to New York, would you try to find him? To – I don’t know, end things right?” He’s watching Beverly’s face carefully; when she sucks in a sharp, pained breath, he rushes to add, “I’m sorry. It’s – I guess that’s not the point, anyway. I just wondered.”

She can almost  _ taste  _ the smoke at the back of her throat.

“Me?” she finally says. “No. Never. Like you said – no laws, no need for a divorce or anything like it. I don’t ever want to see him again.”

Eddie is quiet for a moment. He’s still quiet when he says, “I think that’s good.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Eddie begins, and then stops, probably realizing she means ‘why are you asking’ and not ‘why is it good.’ “Oh. Uh. I just – I think maybe I’m just scared. And I don’t know if trying to end things with Myra face to face would make it better or worse.”

“And you want to know if I think you should?”

Eddie’s mouth is drawn into a thin, nervous line. He doesn’t say anything, which is about as good as an actual affirmative.

Beverly frowns. “Eddie, I don’t know… Have you tried calling her?”

Surprisingly, Eddie nods again. “I used Richie’s phone earlier. It went straight to voicemail.” Even he seems surprised when his eyes well up with tears. He finally looks right at Beverly when he asks, “How fucking awful is it that that came as a relief? I mean, she could be  _ dead _ .”

“I’d be relieved if I knew that had happened to Tom,” Beverly admits. It comes a lot less easily than she wishes it would. “So if that makes you an awful person, you’re not the only one.”

“Yeah, well, he deserves it,” Eddie mutters.

Beverly snorts and rubs absently at her arms, fighting off a phantom chill. An ache that hasn’t quite faded. “Maybe. It’s not a great feeling, though.”

“I know,” Eddie says, quiet again. Neither of them acknowledges the tears they don’t manage to blink back.

“Question for a question,” Beverly says, a little brighter, and now it’s Eddie’s turn to look guarded. “Do you want to elaborate on what this has to do with Richie?”

Eddie blinks, then laughs, softening almost instantly at the mere mention of their friend. As if he hadn’t already made it clear enough. 

“Even I’m not  _ that _ incapable of a little soul-searching,” he says, gesturing weakly at his own head, just about where Richie’s injuries would be.

Beverly whistles. “Vague.”

“What, should I ask if he’s  _ said anything _ about me?” Eddie says with a good-natured eye-roll and an illustrative flutter of his hands. “I don’t even know if he swings that way. So this whole… New York  _ thing,  _ it’s at least sixty percent just for me.”

Beverly can’t help but smile. “One more question.”

“Yeah?”

“Am I the first person you’ve told?”

“If this counts,” Eddie hedges. “Sorry for just… dropping it on you.”

“No, no, I’m honored,” Beverly reassures him. She pauses. “Why me, though?”

“Just thought you’d get it,” Eddie says, eyes downcast.  _ “I _ don’t even get it. I just feel like an idiot for never figuring out I don’t even  _ like _ women. I’ve been  _ married  _ to one for twenty years.”

“You had no idea?” she repeats, raising her eyebrows at him.

“I convinced myself it was like that for everyone,” he tells her, shifting uneasily. “So it didn’t… mean anything.” He doesn’t clarify what he means by ‘like that’ or ‘it,’ and Beverly decides it’s better not to ask. 

She picks at the jagged edge of a broken nail and wonders if things would have been better or worse for her if she’d been able to do the same. The thing is, she’s always known people can be really, genuinely happy with each other. She’s always wanted that – badly enough that she stayed with Tom and told herself different lies. That this was the last time, again and again. That things were getting better, or about to be. That he really loved her, deep down.

“Are you okay?” Eddie says. He’s looking at her again, wide-eyed and frowning slightly.

With a start, Beverly notices the slight tickle of fresh tears on her cheeks. She scrubs them away with the back of her hand and nods.

“Are you sure?” Eddie presses. “God, I didn’t mean to make you cry, I’m sorry”—

“It’s not you,” Beverly interrupts. “It’s – just that we got so stuck. I don’t even know if we can blame that on Pennywise. I wish we could.”

Eddie looks pained. “Me, too.”

“You still owe me, though,” Beverly decides, bringing her palms down loudly on her knees before finally climbing back to her feet. They still ache. They’ll probably ache for a few days yet.

Eddie follows her in a hurry. “Of course, anything. You have no idea – I really appreciate you just listening, Bev. So – thanks.”

She smiles. “Of course, Eddie. And good luck – to both of you.”

“Both of…?”

But Beverly is already headed back out into the hallway. Over her shoulder, she adds, “Just promise you’ll help me find a pack of cigarettes, and we’ll call it even.”

She can hear the distaste in his voice when he says, “Sure, so – what do you smoke?”

She laughs at the way he sounds like he’s reciting a line from a movie. She’d assume he’s never smoked a cigarette in his life if she didn’t specifically know better. Now that they’ve remembered, who could ever forget the handful of times Richie goaded him into sharing smokes in the clubhouse, or down by the quarry?

Now, in hindsight, she wonders about that. 

“If there’s nicotine in it, it’s good enough,” she says, filing that thought away for later consideration. “At this point, I’d even settle for a vape.”

“Ugh,” Eddie says.

From the upstairs hall that overlooks the sparsely furnished living room below, she sees Ben and Richie both glancing up at the sound of their voices.

“Is everything okay up there?” Ben calls. 

“Empty,” Bev calls back.

“It’s normal,” Eddie adds, knee-jerk, and then holds his face in one hand, embarrassed.

Beverly gives him a look she hopes is at least encouraging before they rejoin Richie and Ben downstairs.

Eddie is at Richie’s side in a second, kneeling to get a better look at his pupils and then unselfconsciously asking him to touch his own nose and then Eddie’s. It’s probably meant to be a quick and easy hand-eye coordination check, but it’s kind of funny; clearly Richie thinks so, and Ben and Bev share an amused smile behind Eddie’s back.

When he’s satisfied that Richie is doing alright, tiredness aside, Eddie helps him to his feet and asks him if he wants any extra support walking. He does a pretty bad job of hiding the imploring look he directs at Beverly, but she doubts Richie notices anyway.

“I probably weigh like twice as much as you, so unless you want to spend the rest of the day falling all over the place”—

“For the  _ last time,  _ my height is completely average and unlike  _ you,  _ I actually work out, so I can”—

“Wait, seriously?” Richie says, grinning wider. “Are you as ripped as Ben?”

Eddie stalls, his face going almost as pink as Ben’s. “I… wouldn’t know?”

“Doubt it,” Beverly offers helpfully. Ben smothers a shy smile with the back of his hand and doesn’t comment.

Richie shrugs and slouches dramatically onto Eddie’s shoulders, only managing to avoid knocking their heads together because Eddie seems to anticipate the gesture enough to keep them both steady. “Alright, fine, but don’t let me throw your back out. I’d never hear the end of it.”

“Yeah, especially if it happens because you aren’t even  _ trying  _ to walk normally!”

Richie laughs at the same time as he winces. Eddie notices, of course, and immediately draws them to a stop on their way out the door. He glances back at Ben and Bev as if to say,  _ You saw that, too, right? _

“You okay, Richie?” Ben checks.

“Peachy,” Richie responds with a grin.

“You better not be bullshitting, asshole, I swear to god,” Eddie starts, but he looks a lot more worried than irritated despite the superficial belligerence; Richie reaches across to pat him on the cheek, just missing the steadily healing stab wound there. He’s still smiling, but his tone is apologetic.

“You’re just loud,” he says. “Wouldn’t usually bother me.”

“Oh!” Eddie exclaims, then closes his eyes like he’s internally berating himself for the slip-up. “Oh,” he tries again. “Sorry, Rich.”

“That’s a little ironic,” Beverly notes. “Coming from you, Trashmouth.”

Richie brings the back of his free hand up to his forehead like an actress in a black-and-white movie lamenting some great and unforeseen tragedy. “I know!” He cries, arguably louder than Eddie. “I’m losing my touch!”

It could just be Bev’s imagination, or wishful thinking on Eddie’s behalf, but Richie seems a little more animated after that, walking in easy unison with Eddie, the occasional near-fall notwithstanding. He talks a little faster every time Eddie helps keep him on his feet, and he cracks enough bad jokes to keep them all upbeat in spite of their continued failure to find  _ anyone,  _ let alone Oliver.

They don’t strike out completely, at least; one of the houses they come across has a promising, if also lightly used, ashtray sitting on a little glass coffee table out front. They don’t find their missing companion there, either, but Eddie does come to Bev as they’re leaving, a BIC lighter and a mostly-full pack of cigarettes in hand.

“I’m probably a terrible friend for giving you this stuff,” he says, and really, he  _ does _ look almost guilty about it.

Beverly elbows him not-so-gently in the side before she takes them from him. Eddie only protests lightly; she’s not Richie, after all. Richie’s too busy taking another rest on a nearby armchair to rile Eddie up.

“A promise is a promise,” she reminds him, turning her prize over in her hands. “Actually, you just might be my new favorite.”

“But I’m supposed to be your favorite!” Richie calls.

“I hope I’m at least a contender,” Ben says, returning from one of the bedrooms with an oddly stuffed backpack slung over one shoulder. His eyes light on the cigarettes in Beverly’s hands, and before she’s even had time to process the nervous lurch in the pit of her stomach, his eyes crinkle in amusement. “Oh, that’s fair,” he jokes. “I can’t compete. Where’d you find those, though? I’ve been looking all over.”

Warmth blossoms in Beverly’s chest. She only ever asked Eddie to help look, and Ben, unlike half of the Losers Club, has never smoked in his life.

-*-

By the time Stan finally texts that Losers Club Group B is ready to throw in the towel for the night, the sun is long gone, and Richie is having an increasingly hard time focusing on much of anything for more than a minute or two at a time.

His mind wanders to all the possible places a gangly college kid could hide if he really didn’t want to be found. He sees a storm drain and tries to imagine him fitting into it, but he can’t really picture the guy’s face, let alone his build. He tries to remember his name. He’s reminded every time someone calls it out, but he keeps mixing up Oscar and Oliver, and too quickly the feeling of forgetting makes his stomach twist so much it hurts.

He wonders what it would have felt like if Eddie had kissed him before he shaved, rather than after. He wonders if he’ll do it again, or if he actually dreamed it.

He thinks about  _ that  _ so much that he’s half-afraid he’ll say something damning every time someone tries to get his attention.

Even when it’s not Eddie, Eddie’s always there to give him worried looks that remind Richie too much of his crying face, scared as hell and still taking such meticulous care of Richie’s injuries that Richie can’t help but think he was lucky they couldn’t get him to a real doctor.

It’s almost enough to make a guy feel bad for soaking up the extra attention like a frog in a puddle. Eddie would absolutely flip if Richie were to actually say that getting severely concussed was worth it for a kiss, but what the fuck – it’s probably the only way he was ever going to get that lucky.

He can’t remember if anyone actually established that their group’s second half was gonna be coming to give the rest of them a lift back, so when a blindingly bright pair of headlights sweeps over them standing on the manicured lawn of their latest B&E, Richie jumps straight to putting himself between them and Eddie – quite a feat, considering how hard it is to move fast without that extra support from Eddie, and how fucking bad the light hurts his eyes and head.

Richie’s head is still throbbing when Eddie gently takes him by the arm he’s holding out as a wobbly, makeshift shield and guides him out of the path of the beams. His eyes hurt less when he finally opens them again, but he can still hardly see through the spots that cloud his vision.

“It’s just Bill and the others, Richie, remember?” Eddie says. His volume increases abruptly as a car door clicks open somewhere in front of them. “Hey, thanks for dimming the lights, not like any of us have an injury that makes us sensitive to bright”—

“D-d-don’t talk to him like that,” Richie hears Bill say. “W-we didn’t know. Richie”—?

“I’m fine,” Richie says. “Except where the fuck is the –  _ ow,”  _ he hisses, inadvertently banging his shins against the edge of the car mid-step. Eddie pulls him back a moment too late and sucks in a sharp, sympathetic breath.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says. Richie can’t make out his expression until his vision gradually clears a few minutes later, but he can tell he’s going out of his way to be extra gentle helping him find a spot to sit.

He watches Eddie dig a couple Tylenols from his bag, shoving aside newly acquired boxes of pasta, clothes and assorted pill bottles from dozens of medicine cabinets to get to it. With a grateful nod, Richie takes the painkiller, plus a bottle of water from a giant pack of them by his feet – also new, so clearly they’re not the only ones who’ve been collecting supplies while they searched.

Eddie and Stan both help him inside at the end of the short drive back. It’s how Richie notices the pair of binoculars swinging from Stan’s neck. Or a very binocular-shaped case, anyway. 

“What’s this?” he wonders, making a grab for it, which Stan neatly dodges.

“What it looks like,” he says. “Pats thought they might come in handy.”

“I thought you could watch birds with them,” Patty says, reassuringly amused. She gives the long band a gentle tug that turns into a playful attempt to lead her husband into the kitchen.

“Sounds handy to me,” Richie calls. “Maybe Bev can teach you how to hunt so we won’t starve on the road.”

Stanley visibly shudders. “That’s completely against the spirit of birdwatching, Richie! Ugh!"

“Spirit of birdwatching,” Eddie repeats with a chuckle,  _ just  _ quietly enough that only Richie hears it. He’s sunk down onto the couch beside him, his hand mere inches from Richie’s face. It’s pleasantly distracting, especially now that it’s just the two of them in the living room.

“I wonder if he still keeps a bird diary,” Richie wonders. Against his better judgment, he edges just a little closer to Eddie. He doesn’t seem to notice, which is both a relief and painfully disheartening.

“Oh my god, I totally forgot about that,” Eddie laughs. “Hey, we should get him one!”

“I already beat you to it,” Patty interjects, startling both of them. She’s come back from the kitchen, a can of something in one hand and a wooden spoon in another. “But if you happen to come across any field guides, there are species he has to look up,” she adds. “Every now and then.”

“Aw,” Richie says, surreptitiously shifting slightly away from Eddie. He can’t even bring himself to poke fun at that; it’s just sweet, and maybe a little intimidating, in a weird way. At least  _ one  _ of them wound up in a good relationship; Richie’s kind of glad it was Stan. “Will do.”

“Do you guys need some help in there?” Eddie asks, but to Richie’s private relief, he doesn’t move to get up.

“Oh, no, we’re fine,” Patty assures him. “I just thought we should make sure you can eat everything we were planning to put in the soup.”

Richie turns to look back at Eddie so fast that the pain in his head spikes again, though it subsides almost instantly. He doesn’t get to see Eddie deliver a long, maybe even recently-updated list of food allergies, anyway; instead, Eddie just gets this adorably contemplative look on his face before he finally shrugs and refocuses his attention on Patty.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, except when she starts to head back to the kitchen – there’s the sound of someone, maybe Bill, dropping something heavy on the floor, followed by a chorus of ‘are you okay’s and Mike offering to take whatever it was off his hands – Eddie visibly hesitates and then sheepishly raises his voice to say, “Except – uh, just no cashews, maybe?”

Patty smiles, but Richie doubts she finds it as cute as he does. “Mike told me that,” she says, and then she’s gone.

The two of them keep up a meandering conversation while they wait. Meandering by their standards, anyway – Richie gets a kick out of watching Eddie speak with his hands, putting physical italics to his long-winded explanation of exactly why they absolutely can’t give their car – “or  _ any  _ car, for that matter” – the Mad Max treatment.

Richie reminds him that he’s more than good enough with his hands to attach a few spikes, at least, and Eddie reluctantly admits that, yes, he could  _ in theory  _ do a little welding. “But it’d be really fucking impractical,” he insists. “And there’s no way it would look as cool as you’re thinking.”

“So you admit Mad Max cars look cool! Come on, I know you saw the new one last year!”

“I saw the trailers,” Eddie says, and then he pauses with his lips pressed tight together, and Richie figures he’s inadvertently stumbled on the thing Eddie’s looking for a distraction from – the thing he’d rather talk to Bev about than Richie. Which is fine. Richie is curious and a little bit worried, but he doesn’t push.

Eddie doesn’t need a push, though. He’s quiet for a while, but then he sighs, long and tired, and says, “Yeah, Myra, she… uh, doesn’t like watching stuff like that.”

She doesn’t like  _ me  _ watching stuff like that, Richie hears. And he finds himself wishing it had been Stan  _ and  _ Eddie who got good partners. Stan and Eddie and Bev, at the barest fucking minimum. 

“Too violent?” Richie guesses, because that’s exactly the kind of thing his mom used to say.  _ Too violent, Eddie, it’ll give you nightmares for weeks, _ but Richie knows for a fact that for all the late-night movies they watched without parental approval, Eddie almost never got any nightmares.

Not from that, anyway.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “But, hey, if we can find a copy somewhere before electricity starts failing, find a TV…”

Richie feels his smile go all soft at the edges. “I’d love – I’d love that, Eds.”

Eddie smiles, too, but there’s still a nervous edge to it. It makes Richie nervous, too, but he can’t pin down why.

Eddie says, “Listen…”

And then their friends come out with bowls filled to the brim with what looks like several different pre-made soups thrown together, one for each of them and an oven-warmed loaf of bread to share. 

The soup is a lot better than it looks, thanks mostly to Mike, by the sound of it. Bill in particular gushes about how lucky they are to have him around, and Mike gets flustered in a way that briefly distracts Richie from the apologetic look Eddie gives him before he clears his throat and addresses the room at large.

“Guys, I actually have something – a favor to ask.”

Beverly, of course, doesn’t look surprised in the slightest.

“Wh-what is it, Eddie?” Bill asks. 

Eddie lowers his own untouched bowl of food to his lap and says, “It’s not exactly urgent, but when we’re – uh, ready, to move on, New York’s not that far from here. So if it’s not too dangerous, maybe we could make a little detour? I’d like to try to find my wife.”

Richie has to fight down a wave of nausea. Or tears, maybe. He sets his own food down precariously on the arm of the couch, appetite gone.

“…just as soon as possible,” Patty is saying, conspicuously more animated than the rest of them, which is as good a sign as any that Stan never went so far as to discuss his friends’ relationships with her. Richie’s sure she’d have figured it out, eventually, given enough time. “Or we could split up, to get to her faster without leaving Oliver…”

But Eddie is shaking his head, and Richie doesn’t know why he looks so guilty. “It really isn’t that urgent. It’s not like you and Stan,” he says, “and that’s a good thing, don’t worry.”

Richie clears his throat, feeling like he should say something. The words stick there despite his best efforts, but he still manages a feeble, “But we can go, right? The more the merrier, and all that.”

He feels like he’s got whiplash on top of a concussion. One second, Eddie’s dropping hints about the abuse he’s lived with for way too many years of his life, same shit, (sort of) different person, and the next he’s ready to go back to her. 

Richie wonders if he’s more of an asshole for acting like he thinks that’s fine, or if he’s just a creep for wishing Eddie hadn’t asked for this particular favor. 

He can’t even bring himself to look Eddie in the eyes, he’s so choked with a sickening mix of grief and guilt.

“I th-think we c-can manage that,” Bill says. “Even if it is d-dangerous, w-we can prepare.”

“Big city,” Mike says. “A lot of things could’ve happened there. Have you tried”—

“Calling her, yeah,” Richie interrupts. He’s kicking himself for not thinking more of that. Should’ve taken it for the wake-up call it so clearly was, but he’s always been stupid about Eddie.

“She didn’t pick up,” Eddie continues, catching Richie’s gaze at last and holding it without having to try. “She pretty much always does, so. I don’t know, if anything, it’s probably already…” He shrugs, looking pained, and Richie forgets himself, gives Eddie’s arm a gentle squeeze and tries to piece together what kind of comfort he’s offering. He has no idea what Eddie needs to hear, so for once, he doesn’t say anything.

“Well, we needed a plan for after we find Oliver, right?” Beverly says. “I think this qualifies. We’ll just stock up on weapons beforehand, and if we don’t need them – all the better.”

“I really fucking hope we don’t need them,” Eddie sighs.

Richie forces a smile for him. “Well, if the Big Apple’s full of zombies, maybe you’ll help me Mad Max the car after all, huh?”

“Do… what to the car?” Ben asks.

“No,” Eddie huffs.  _ “No,  _ because that’s stupid.”

“Like put spikes on it?” Beverly asks, clapping her hands together in absolute delight. Richie feels his smile settle into something a little more genuine; he can always count on Bev to go for the fun ideas. “Eddie, you can do that?”

“I’m not going to!”

“I could help,” Ben offers. “I know how to weld. It’s a pretty useful hobby.”

“O-okay, obviously we can’t do that before New York,” Bill interjects. “But maybe a-after?”

“If we suddenly find ourselves with tons of time on our hands to do stuff that serves literally no function other than to make a car harder to fix if it breaks  _ just  _ because it looks really cool”—

“Emphasis on the part where it looks ‘really’ cool,” Richie interrupts Eddie with an elbow to the ribs. Eddie laughs and shoves back, which of course means some of his soup sloshes onto both of them. Neither of them really minds, although Eddie makes a show of swiping some of Richie’s in recompense.

“I have an idea about transportation too, actually,” Mike says.

“Please no more about putting spikes on things,” Stan replies, but Richie has a sneaking suspicion they could get him to crack by going through Patty. She looks almost as interested as Beverly, and twice as amused at the prospect.

“Unfortunately no,” Mike says. “But what about a camper? A trailer, or a whole bus? They’re pretty big, but that’s kind of the point, anyway, right?”

“I like that idea,” Eddie admits. “It’d be a lot more comfortable. Richie could get more rest while he’s recovering, too.”

They wind up developing a loose plan to keep an eye out for one, and, failing that, to look for an RV retailer somewhere along the way. When they’re done here, of course, and maybe Richie’s a little relieved that Eddie doesn’t seem to mind the possibility of a longer wait.

If Richie had a little more energy left to spare, he’d have been able to really throw himself into forgetting his own selfish feelings about the whole New York leg of their end-of-the-world tour. As it stands, though, he’s still sick with nerves by the time he and Eddie retreat back to the room they shared before. If someone hadn’t  _ just  _ disappeared from the living room not even twenty-four hours ago, Richie thinks he’d probably have offered to take the couch, rumpled blankets, soup-stain and all.

But Bill had to go and make a point of advising everyone to stick together tonight, and Richie doesn’t want to leave Eddie alone any more than Eddie seems to want to leave him, so they don’t even really discuss it. Nerves or not, Richie almost prefers it that way.

Except that when Eddie comes back from changing clothes, freshly showered and carrying his first-aid kit with him, the first thing he does after getting Richie to sit up for him is to start a discussion.

“So, I wanted to say this before, but it didn’t work out,” he begins, already pulling on a fresh pair of latex gloves. “Obviously.”

“Say what, Eds?” Richie asks. The oxygen in the room feels too thin all of a sudden.  _ Back off, Richie, please reel it in, I’m not interested— _

“I told Bev, so…” Eddie smiles, carefully starting to peel back the tape on Richie’s forehead but not quite meeting his eyes. “I’m gay.”

Richie pulls back so fast that the tape comes off with a painful tug, all at once, and Eddie curses.

“Richie”—

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what?’ You could at least say something supportive, asshole, it’s kind of a big deal that I figured this out after four fucking decades!”

“You’re gay?” Richie repeats, feeling more than ever like his brain is working in slow motion. “But you… you have a wife. That you wanna look for.”

“For closure,” Eddie says. “That’s all. You just seemed worried about it, I don’t know. So just so you know – that’s all it is.”

“Closure,” Richie repeats dumbly.

“If she’s okay, we can maybe help her get somewhere safe, find another group or something, but,” Eddie says, taking a deep breath, “I don’t want her to stay with us. I don’t.”

“Oh,” Richie breathes, dizzy. “So like – an apocalypse divorce, huh? That’s pretty cool.”

“You fucking suck at this,” Eddie announces. He shuffles a little closer to Richie and starts to dab at his cut with a soft cotton pad. “Beverly was all ‘I’m honored, Eddie,’ and you’re just like, ‘That’s cool.’ It’s depressing.”

“I’m sorry,” Richie says.

I love you, he wants to say. 

“Are you gonna forget I told you?” Eddie wonders, finally meeting his eyes. He looks… scared. Vulnerable. “Because I already had to work up the nerve twice. I’m gonna be pissed if I have to do it again just so you’ll be one of the first to know.”

“I won’t forget,” Richie vows. “It’s too important, Eds. Thank – thanks for telling me. I…”

“…don’t wanna talk about it anymore, right?” Eddie snorts. “That makes two of us, but look, um, when I’m done with the ‘apocalypse divorce,’ can we pick this back up? Because I’m not finished.”

Richie has to fight down the irrational surge of hope that threatens to overwhelm him, then. It’s a little funny, because, wow, Eddie likes men, too, but Richie’s not even that far off from being the last man on the planet. And even then, there’s just no way Eddie’s into him. 

“You look like you’re about to cry,” Eddie says. “Did I seriously freak you out that bad? Wanna switch with someone for tonight?”

“I don’t mind sleeping with you,” Richie blurts. “I mean, I want to. Fuck – I just, I”—really want to be half as brave as you right now—”I admire you for being able to just  _ say  _ that.”

Eddie stares at him, his fingers stilling against Richie’s forehead. “Uh. Thanks for the backhanded compliment, I guess?”

“It’s not – fuck off, I mean it,” Richie mutters. “You’re amazing. I love… having you around, okay?”

It must not be what Eddie needs to hear, this time, because he just looks sad by the end of it. He goes back to replacing the bandage on Richie’s forehead with another fresh one, and his hands don’t shake, but Richie knows he only ever chews on his lips like that when he’s trying to keep the rest of himself steady, too. 

“…I love having you around, too,” he says. “Asshole.”

“Sticks and stones, Eds,” Richie says. It gets a weak smile out of Eddie, at least, but Richie doesn’t like the tension that clicks into place between them after that. He doesn’t like that Eddie gets all mopey but tries to act like he’s not, and he doesn’t like that Eddie doesn’t kiss him again as they settle in to sleep.

Richie can’t even work up the nerve to joke about it, let alone make a teasing comment about leaving room for Jesus when Eddie carefully positions himself as far away from Richie as their little bed will allow.

_ Don’t get the wrong idea, though, Tozier.  _

Well, he doesn’t. And because it hurts just a little less than having to face an outright rejection, he lets Eddie get the wrong idea about him. 

But he falls asleep feeling inspired, too, in a deeply hypothetical, if-I-were-also-a-completely-different-person kind of way. Eddie just has that effect on him; Richie can’t imagine  _ not  _ wanting to be like him  _ and  _ with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I learned something this week and that is that I don't know how to do foreshadowing. :)


	7. Let Love Light the Way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone who is following this story for your patience, as always! Some relevant information for those who, like me, haven't read the book: Ben wears cowboy boots in book canon. Isn't that a delightful little detail?

Ben’s precariously balanced armful of messily packed bags and spare bedding hits the bare mattress with a dull thump, followed by a slightly louder _thunk_ as one of them tumbles off onto the faux-wood floor at his feet.

He bends down to pick it back up, but Bev beats him to it with a triumphant _“Ha!”_

She straightens up with the little backpack dangling from one hand, and Ben’s face heats up a little when he remembers what’s in it. Beverly notices, he thinks, because she doesn’t touch the zipper, instead offering it back to him with a bright, curious smile.

“You know I’ve been dying to ask what’s in here.”

“It’s nothing,” Ben says, taking the bag back and holding it in front of him like a shield. 

Beverly nods and gets started on making up each of the bunk beds. She’s still smiling faintly, in an unforced, I-know-you’re-lying-but-that’s-okay kind of way, like she finds the whole thing endearing.

The first set of sheets barely fits around the extra topper they found to make the mediocre RV mattresses a little more comfortable; Bev raises an eyebrow at Ben, but instead of helping, he pauses and then draws back the backpack’s zipper enough that he can just glimpse a bit of unworn leather inside.

Beverly drops the topsheet, forgetting their task in favor of the little mystery in front of her. 

“Okay, it’s probably not as interesting as you’re thinking,” Ben warns, and he pulls one of the boots out to show her. He can’t help but admire the elaborate pattern tooled into the shaft, for so long that he actually misses the way Beverly’s smile widens until she laughs. 

It’s a gentle laugh, surprised if anything. Ben still shrinks a little, suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the kinds of standards Bev must have as a big-name fashion designer. They’re probably too tacky, period, and definitely too tacky for _him._

But the way she reaches out to trace the edge of one delicately-carved leaf is almost impressed. It’s definitely not skeptical or disgusted in the slightest.

“Cowboy boots,” she says. “Not what I expected, but… wow, they’re beautiful, Ben. Where’d you find them?”

“Top shelf in someone’s closet. It doesn’t look like anyone ever touched them.” He pauses. “So I’m thinking they probably won’t be missed.”

She snorts. “Yeah, I doubt it.” She looks back at him, her finger stilling against the smooth surface of the leather. “They fit you?”

“In theory?” Ben says, nervous again. “They’re my size. I doubt I could pull them off, though. Just always thought they were kind of cool.”

“If you like them, you can pull them off,” Beverly says with that easy certainty Ben’s always loved her for. “I’m sort of an expert, so…”

Ben laughs with her. “Yeah, you should know.”

“So try them!” she says, like that completely settles it. It’s impossible not to get caught up in her enthusiasm, so Ben finally eases himself back down onto the mattress and unlaces his shoes. He’s pretty ready to be done with this pair, anyway; Eddie may be a little overly concerned about how hygienic it is to still be wearing sneakers that have been completely waterlogged more than once, but they really are nearing the end of their natural lifespan.

The new boots are stiff – more evidence that they’ve been neglected since someone purchased them god-knows-where – but they’re not exactly uncomfortable, either. They fit like a glove, albeit a glove that needs a little breaking-in.

Beverly helps him to his feet like he weighs nothing at all. “They suit you. Who’d’ve thought?”

 _“You_ did,” Ben reminds her. “Just now.”

“I only said you could pull them off,” Beverly says. “These were practically made for you. That’s different.”

She tugs him forward a few steps, lets her back hit the wooden railing of the bunks on the opposite wall and smiles when Ben’s hands come up to frame her face. Ben’s still battling his own self-consciousness, but when Beverly grabs the front of his shirt and pulls him in for a kiss, the euphoria of it wins for the moment.

“We need to get you a hat,” she announces when they part again, giving his chest a decisive pat before he can get too far away from her. “And I’m going to do some embroidery. We can get a whole outfit going.”

Ben laughs, but the thought of getting to wear something Beverly made just for him is… enticing.

“Richie will have a field day with it,” he says. Assuming he even notices, head injury and all. He hasn’t been the most observant these past several days, but then, no one else’s observation skills have helped them find their missing person, either.

“If he gives you a hard time I’ll give him another concussion,” Beverly promises. She’d definitely have to go through Eddie, too, but Ben doesn’t doubt she could.

“And then the whole group falls apart,” Ben jokes, feeling a little like Richie, at least as far as his gung-ho confidence to crack unfunny jokes goes. “And we dissolve into total anarchy.”

He hasn’t seen many movies about the end of the world, but it’s not hard to imagine that’s probably how at least some of them go.

“And it all starts with a pair of boots,” Beverly laughs. “Well, at least when we’ve splintered off into a separate faction and drawn do-not-cross lines down the middle of this trailer, I’ll have plenty of inspiration to pass the time. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at leatherworking. It’s amazing, the things you can do.”

“I’d love to see that,” Ben says excitedly. “You know how?”

“I learned a little in college,” she says. He sees something shutter closed behind her eyes as she continues. “But it was a one-off elective, and by the time it occurred to me to do something with it, Tom and I were sharing a brand. He didn’t even want to try, so,” she shrugs. “That was that.”

Ben’s chest aches so much his breath hitches. It makes him worse than angry, every awful thing Beverly lets him know about her husband. It makes his rebuttal come out too fierce, too pained.

“I think people would’ve loved it.”

“Guess we’ll never know,” Beverly says. Her shoulder twitches; Ben massages it gently with the pad of his thumb, and after a moment the anger subsides. It vanishes completely when Beverly smiles at him.

“Well, _I_ know,” he says. “And I’ll be looking forward to anything you decide to make,” _even if it isn’t for me,_ although he really would love it if it was. “But please don’t give Richie any more concussions.”

Richie’s voice cuts in before Beverly has time to answer. “Yeah, he’d really appreciate it if you didn’t. Are you two almost done? Because it looks like you aren’t.”

Ben keeps his hand on Beverly’s shoulder. He looks at Richie standing by the door just in time to catch him giving him a sweeping onceover.

“Wow, someone really went native in North Dakota, huh?”

“Nebraska,” Ben corrects him.

“Beep beep, Richie,” Bev says.

Richie raises his hands in mock surrender. He’s smiling, but it’s as subdued as his comment.

“Fine, fine, _boot_ me out of your fashion-forward bed-making session. Or unmaking,” he adds with a wink. Beverly raises a pillow like she intends to throw it at him, but she’s fighting back a smile. 

“Fuck you, Tozier.”

“I think I’ll pass,” Richie laughs. There’s a flash of _something_ in his expression, but it passes before Ben can really wonder about it. “Anyway, Bill wanted me to tell you dinner will be ready soon.”

The way he says it sort of implies he’s not convinced that’s true, so Ben asks, a little guiltily, “Did he actually burn the pasta?”

Richie settles back against the frame of the door. “Yeah, he dropped some into the drip bowl when he was trying to add it to the pot. I say we’re lucky he didn’t burn the water.”

Ben frowns. “Mike’s helping too, though, right?”

“Even Mikey’s not an actual miracle worker,” Richie points out. It’s a little mean, Ben thinks, but then it _is_ kind of amazing that Bill somehow made it into his forties without learning how to follow the directions on the back of a cardboard box. “Anyway, Eddie’s waiting on me to help outline our search route for tomorrow. Give him like two more minutes and he’ll assume I had a stroke.”

He doesn’t wait for a response from either of them before he detaches himself from the hideous marbled plastic wall of the trailer and rattles his way back down the stairs outside. 

It’s a wonder he ever managed to sneak up on them with that heavy tread of his. Ben can still hear him mutter something about people in suburban Maine owning cowboy boots by the time he’s several yards away.

“This coming from the one who’s been wearing Hawaiian shirts for almost three decades straight,” Beverly says with a fond shake of her head.

“Now that’d be a combination,” Ben adds. He likes the idea that a person can make something look good just by enjoying wearing it, but he supposes there are limits all the same. Or maybe he just has a lot to learn from Beverly.

He doesn’t see the same charm in bright, loud clothes that Richie does, but he’d try it anyway if he thought it might make Bev laugh.

-*-

After dinner – a decent almost-first attempt on Bill’s part, all things considered – Mike makes short work of packing away one more box of supplies for the night. Days into their unplanned stay in a once-wealthy neighborhood, they’ve accumulated quite an assortment, from tools, matches and flashlights to an axe, a few knives and several particularly good books, all of which are there because Mike couldn’t resist taking them along with him.

It’s just that abandoning them to gather dust and suffer the elements went against every fiber of his being. Bill was quick to allocate some of their limited space to what he affectionately refers to as the library.

No one really seems to mind, anyway, but Mike’s still been making some hard choices about what to take and what to leave. The storage under the RV’s couch is already stuffed – _neatly_ – with some of his favorites, plus some personalized recommendations for each of the Losers, Patty included.

He’s squirreled away a handful of Bill’s books, too; that’s an easy choice, great endings or no.

With the box now carefully folded shut, Mike is halfway through adding _‘water filtration’_ to the list of its contents when something grabs his attention – a tall, dark shape lurking just at the edge of his peripheral vision.

The shape seems to bend for a moment, like a tree weathering gusting wind, but slower than that. Slow enough that he could have imagined it.

Mike gets halfway through a tired greeting before his turning in that direction reveals nothing.

No person, no dark shape, just the stark white walls of the bedroom he’s been sharing with Bill.

He frowns, glancing around at their empty room, unmade bed, blinds drawn and lights turned down low, and when he’s satisfied that he really is alone, he lets go of his held breath long enough to screw his eyes shut and rub slow circles into his temples.

When he opens them again, Richie is standing in the doorway. Mike jerks and curses like he’s been electrocuted. Richie shuts his mouth, whatever greeting he’d been about to offer dying on his tongue, and then he opens it again.

“I come in peace,” he says. It’s a pretty good approximation of an old _Star Trek_ alien, kind of robotic. His gaze drops to the box Mike’s kneeling in front of. “Dude, are you organizing our shit with, like, the Dewey Decimal System?”

Mike laughs. “No, just trying to be thorough. Where’s Eddie?”

Without further ado, Richie comes over and unceremoniously plops himself down on the carpet beside Mike. Complete with a long, drawn-out sigh. “Chatting with Ben about building things. They lost me less than five minutes in.” He pauses. “It’s… cute, though.”

Mike pauses, too, musing at the way Richie says that like he’s testing the waters. “I guess you’re not talking about Ben.”

Richie shrugs. “Well, I’m not blind. But no. I said I was gonna come help you pack.”

“I’m pretty much done for the night,” Mike says apologetically.

“I figured,” Richie says. “I’d probably just mess up your system, anyway.”

Mike only watches Richie fidget in uncomfortable silence for another second or two before he decides to take pity on him. “Would it help if I promise to keep the rest of this conversation just between us?”

Richie swallows. “On pain of death, Hanlon.”

Mike holds up a pinky. Richie lightens up enough to offer his own, and they shake on it. Richie’s hands are clammy; his voice quavers just the tiniest bit when he lets go and says, “So. Sorry if I’m way off the mark or this is way too personal, but just – are you and Bill…?”

Mike feels his expression freeze; his answer comes out alarmingly fast by comparison. “Bill’s married.”

“That’s not – okay, yeah,” Richie says, clearly not sure how to continue. “But – but if he wasn’t?”

“I kinda thought this was supposed to be about you,” Mike says. All he means to imply is that he’d like to know where Richie’s going with this, at _least,_ but Richie looks like a man being held at gunpoint. Mike’s so busy trying to come up with a more diplomatic way to let him know that he’s just not especially eager to bare his already precariously-balanced heart that he nearly misses Richie’s muttered comment. 

“…like this would be easier if you were too.”

“What?”

“Gay,” Richie says, a little louder.

Mike flounders trying to come up with a response to that when it becomes clear that Richie is done talking. 

“Uh… yes?”

Richie’s frown deepens. “Okay, that wasn’t… as bad as I thought, but I’m definitely starting to see why getting a lackluster response sucks.”

It finally clicks, then. “Oh, you’re not asking me.”

Richie winces. “Well, I kinda…”

Mike scoots forward in a single smooth motion, the better to wrap his arms around his friend. When Richie starts sniffling, he lets the hug linger until Richie finally decides to gently push him away. 

By the time he does, Mike’s shoulder is slightly damp. Richie’s eyes are red-rimmed and still a little dewy, but he’s smiling, which Mike takes to be a good sign even if he is also quick to look away.

“Thanks.”

“You know, if you wanted to know if I’m gay, you could have just asked me that,” Mike says. “It would have been less personal than… never mind, I – uh, I get it now, sorry. And yes, I am. If you want to know about Bill, you’ll have to ask him”—

Richie’s head snaps up so fast Mike wonders if it hurts. “Have _you_ asked?”

Mike sucks in a sharp breath. “…No. It’s complicated.”

Richie’s only response is a prompting nod. _Go on._ Mike’s first instinct is to gently steer the conversation back to whatever point Richie’s trying to get at, assuming Mike isn’t mistaken in assuming there is another one, but he’s distracted by how touching it is to get that from their resident Trashmouth. For anyone who didn’t know him as well as they all do, it’d probably be pretty hard to believe he can be a good listener when he isn’t busy talking, himself. Just like it’d be hard to imagine him coming out as gay, but Mike had already guessed as much, albeit pretty recently. 

That he doesn’t think _Bill_ has seems like explanation enough to Mike, but he does his best to offer Richie a better, blunter explanation than that. God only knows what gave his feelings away to Richie of all people, but now that they’re out in the open between them, Mike finds it harder and harder to stop spelling the rest of this thing out, letter by letter.

He talks about Bill’s talent for bringing people together, his dangerous-but-endearing tendency to act first and ask questions later, the way he cares so much that sometimes it gets to be _too_ much. He talks about how it was his childhood crush on Bill that made him come to an early realization about his attraction to guys in general, and how the fact that it was Bill in particular made that realization less terrifying than it could have been.

Richie laughs without much humor when he gets to that part. “Yeah, I mean, who just casually crushes on Bill, right?”

“I thought we all did!” Mike insists, mildly offended on Bill’s behalf. He’s more tentative about it when he adds, “What about you? Did you have a thing for Eddie back then, too?”

“…Yeah, since we were like eleven. Or that’s when I figured it out, anyway.” He lets out a long, carefully measured breath. “God, I can’t believe I actually said that. ‘D you guys put something in that pasta?”

Mike smiles. “Not this time.”

Richie rocks forward, fidgeting with his hands in his lap. “How’d you know about my… this thing with Eddie? Am I that fucking obvious?”

“Not any more than me, probably,” Mike offers. “I guess when I saw you two in bed together the other day, there was just… something about it. Anyone would be a little jealous of what you guys have.”

In his mind’s eye he sees Bill reaching for him, feels the warm, drowsy brush of skin on skin, remembers pulling away despite aching desperately to move in closer. He’d love to wrap himself around Bill like that, breathe him in, flirt badly and kiss him with all the conviction he knows he’d feel if he didn’t have to worry about crossing lines with every touch.

“It’s not like that, Mike,” Richie says, kind of strangled, like he’s fighting the urge to cough or cry. “At least not for Eddie. Pretty sure he thinks I’m straight, and don’t forget you pinky swore you’d help me keep it that way.”

“I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone what you’re telling me,” Mike says, “but okay – does this mean I’m the only person who knows you’re gay?”

“Yup.” 

“Well, for what it’s worth, I think you should at least consider talking to him about it,” Mike says slowly.

“That’s so hypocritical,” Richie accuses. “Mister ‘It’s Complicated’”—

“It _is,”_ Mike whisper-shouts, miming something he hopes Richie will take to mean _keep your voice down._ “Look, I don’t even know if _Bill_ knows where he’s coming from, okay? Let alone have any idea, myself.”

Richie does lower his voice to respond, and the barely-audible flow of conversation way down the hall continues uninterrupted.

If anything, he sounds stretched-thin and dangerously close to crying again when he says, “And you – you can’t help wondering if he’s just. Experimenting with you? And you trust him so it doesn’t really make sense to even think that, you know? But that voice in the back of your head just keeps going”—and he puts on a Voice that sounds almost disturbingly similar to Pennywise’s—“‘but there’s no better explanation, is there?’”

“First of all, please don’t do that again,” Mike laughs, a little unnerved despite himself. “And there is, for _you.”_

“Never said I was talking about me,” Richie says immediately.

“Richie, no offense, but that was too specific not to be, and I’m telling you, I can’t see Eddie doing that to you.”

“Well, I can’t see Bill doing that to you, either!” Richie deflects. “He basically thinks you’re the coolest person he’s ever met, and he’s _actually_ famous, way more than the rest of us, so that’s saying something. Plus,” he adds, “we’ve all seen Eddie work on a car, and, no offense, but you’re never gonna top that. That’s my completely unbiased opinion.”

Mike’s face heats up and before he can stop himself, he says, “You think Bill thinks I’m cool?” He has, to the best of his memory, done all of maybe two genuinely cool things in his life. He loves his work, but he knows there aren’t too many people who think of librarians as the epitome of badassery. And Bill is so… _Bill._ He’s a popular writer, a household name, a natural-born leader, and tragically handsome to boot.

Richie smiles and awkwardly pats Mike’s shoulder a few times before he resumes his fidgeting. “Yeah, I don’t have to know shit to know _that._ I’m probably the last guy anyone should go to for actual relationship advice, but Bill likes you, maybe not like _that…”_ He sighs. “‘Kay, that wasn’t supposed to come out sounding so…”

Mike gives Richie’s shoulder a light squeeze in response. It’s how he notices that Richie’s still incredibly tense beneath his meticulously relaxed posture.

“Trying to take a page from you guys’ book, but I guess I still kinda wish”—he turns sharply away from Mike, swallowing down the rest of that sentence as he goes. “Jesus, why is this still so hard.”

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Mike says, and for a moment he’s struck by the thought that Bill would probably offer the same kind of advice if he knew what this was like. “You have the time to take things slow. Just because Eddie went straight from figuring things out to telling us”—

Richie interrupts him with a groan. “How does he do that, Mike? Like – like six separate times, all in a row? I already feel like I’m gonna fucking pass out.”

Mike shrugs. “Ask him.”

“ _You_ ask,” Richie whines.

“Again, Bill’s _married”_ —

“So then we get some actual confirmation about whether or not he wants to take a road trip all the way to sunny California to look for his wife who he never talks about, and we both start looking for eligible forty-something bachelors on the way there. Everyone wins,” Richie says. He doesn’t look convinced, himself, but then he holds a hand out to Mike and also says, “I’ll do my thing – okay, I’ll _think_ about doing my – talking to Eddie, if you’ll try it too, with our fearless leader. Deal?”

His puffed-up confidence fades pretty fast when Mike doesn’t immediately take the proffered hand, but then Mike thinks – _okay,_ and he shakes on it, and Richie finally looks a little relieved.

“Before or after New York?” Mike asks. Knowing Richie, having no deadline could mean he actually holds up his end any time in the next year. 

“After I figure out how to make sure I won’t vomit all over him the second I open my mouth,” Richie says with a lot more chutzpah than that statement really warrants. 

Mike laughs. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, but he’d probably mind a little more if you’re not also bleeding out.”

Richie looks confused, but he doesn’t have time to ask Mike to explain that one before they’re interrupted by approaching footsteps and, to Richie’s apparent alarm, Eddie’s voice.

“Hey, do you guys think we could – uh, where’s Bill?”

“Not here?” Richie says.

Mike is already halfway to his feet even before he hears Eddie’s response. 

“Huh? But he said he was coming to check in on you guys.”

“How long ago?”

Eddie frowns and backs up to let Mike push past him into the hallway. “Ten minutes? Maybe fifteen?”

That’s the last thing Mike hears; he’s pretty sure Richie says something else, and someone tries to touch him, but he shakes them off, feeling like he’s just been plunged headfirst into an airless void.

He probably scares the hell out of his friends, tearing through the house, top to bottom, calling Bill’s name without fully realizing he’s doing it, but if anyone thought he was overreacting at first, the lack of any response from Bill pretty quickly spurs them to the same frenzied action.

Everywhere Mike turns he thinks he sees people hovering at the edges of his vision, thinks he hears dozens of voices at a time whispering back to him, but he ignores every one of them because none of them are Bill’s. They might not be anyone’s.

When he returns to the living room by the front entrance, intent on running out to check the trailer, the front door is already standing wide open.

Beyond its gaping, pristine white frame is an all-consuming, murky blackness – the kind that looks more like a stagnant pool that would cling like oil to your fingers if you were to dip your hand into it. There’s no sign of the dull orange street lamps that remind Mike so much of the ones that used to cast shadows across the ceiling of his library attic-slash-apartment, and no ghostlike outline of neat suburban sidewalks, either.

Bill could be standing just opposite him on the other side of the threshold, and he’d never even know it.

Something flickers again from the corner of Mike’s eye. He glances toward it, dazed and teetering on the edge of just plunging straight into this thing that is either death, plain and simple, or an illusion, plain and simple, and he sees Stan draw to a stop a few feet behind him. Stan looks at the door and then at Mike, and Mike knows the answer to his question before he asks it.

“Did any of us open this?”

Beverly returns to the room with the others in tow as Stanley shakes his head, one hand extended toward Mike’s elbow like he thinks he’ll be able to stop him from going out there. The rest of them eye the open door and the lightless view out the front windows with varying levels of dread and confusion.

“It didn’t look like that a minute ago,” Patty says, already gravitating back toward Stan. “What is that?”

“Everyone stay here,” Mike says. He sort of wishes he had something on him he could use to defend himself, just in case, but his heart pumping ice-cold blood from its new place in his throat tells him it wouldn’t do him any good, anyway, and there’s another instinct he didn’t even know he had telling him that Bill has too little time for that – maybe none at all, but _no,_ and he shakes Stan off and staggers through the door with a forceful promise to be back in a minute. 

Outside, the ground beneath his feet feels like the surface of a wind-tossed lake. It gives way again and again, making Mike’s stomach drop and his heart skip a beat every time, but there’s never any impact, and in the absence of any visual evidence to the contrary, he has to assume he’s still moving forward. 

When he finally sees something, it startles him so badly that he loses what little balance he still felt like he had. It’s a flash of gray, a bit of skin, a flicker at the furthest corner of his periphery, and because he can’t see his own hand, he doesn’t see the hand that takes it in an instant that abruptly draws everything around Mike to a perfect halt, like he’s suspended in water or open air.

He doesn’t hear his own sharp cry, but he hears Bill.

“M-Mikey?”

It’s cold here, Mike realizes, and there are warm tears coursing down his cheeks.

“Bill,” he calls. He grabs at the wrist he can feel brushing against his fingertips and hopes to god it’s really Bill’s. “Where are you? Where did you go?”

“To look at the stars… I think,” Bill responds. Mike can feel his breath tickle the shell of his ear, he’s so close. A shiver runs down his spine, and just like that, light unfurls over his head, rolling past in a long wave like a sleeping bag being shaken out. 

The light – no, the _lights_ are easily recognizable as stars, but the sight is somehow still alien to Mike; there’s not a single constellation in any of it that he recognizes, and it’s only through a deliberate effort not to get caught up in the strangeness of it that he’s able to tear his eyes away.

This time, he turns toward that barest suggestion of a presence at his side very slowly, like it’s a stray cat he’s trying not to scare with any sudden movements, and he lets his own desperate hope fill him until it becomes too much for him to hold. He lets it overrun the hazy boundary of himself, his body, his heart. He lets it be the love it wants to be, bright and solid, a beacon.

Bill drops his gaze slowly from the stars to Mike. He looks a thousand miles away, but his hand is still wrapped firmly around Mike’s. He looks like he’s coming down from somewhere, like something reached him wherever he was.

“I saw Oliver,” he says, and he frowns. “Is this – is this real?”

“I don’t know,” Mike says. Then—“Yes – _yes. This_ is. Right here.” 

He holds their entwined hands up between them, an anchor weight that sinks into the space Mike moves to fill. 

He kisses Bill the way Bill does everything, recklessly, gently, and he feels Bill jump against him before he kisses back with an enthusiasm that makes Mike simultaneously nervous and giddy. He opens his eyes to the soft orange glow of street lamps, unmarked asphalt beneath their feet. Behind him, he hears their friends all start talking at once.

“It’s gone!”

“There, he has”—

Richie wolf whistles, and Bill laughs open-mouthed against Mike before pulling away.

“J-just so you know,” Bill says, relinquishing his grip on Mike’s hand so that Mike can get a better look at his ring finger. It’s bare, and Mike is somehow less surprised by that than by the fact that he doesn’t know when Bill took the ring off.

“After the f-fight, and before all – all this, Audra called, to ask for a divorce. I agreed,” he says, and struggles for a moment to finish, “and I think that’s – that’ll have to be enough. I was g-going to tell you, I just couldn’t find the right… oh, you’re crying.”

Mike pulls him into a hug before he can do anything about the tears still spilling down his face. Bill doesn’t hesitate to hug him back, but he does ask, “You okay, Mikey?”

“We almost lost you,” Mike cries. _“I_ almost lost you.”

“…I think we know what happened to Oliver,” Bill says somberly. His voice is muffled by Mike’s shoulder. “You s-saved my life, didn’t you?”

Mike holds him just a little tighter. “That’s what losers are for, right?”

He feels Bill shake his head. “N-not just that, not us.”

He breaks away, ready to rejoin their friends on the front lawn of the house, but there’s another moment where he pauses with a smile, and Mike feels his heart thud heavy in his chest. Their hands are still joined; he wonders if Bill can feel it.

“I – I’ve always been… bad at letting go,” Bill says, “but I’m glad I d-didn’t, this time.”

“I lo – I am, too,” Mike says, catching himself without really meaning to.

Before he can even regret it, Bill responds, in that decisive, reckless way of his, “Love you, too, Mikey.”


	8. NYC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Howdy! I'm tragically sick at the moment (just a cold, I'll live!) but still very excited to start in on the penultimate chapter! My goal is to have this fic wrapped up by the end of the month, because I'll be spending the first week of March visiting an old friend in California - which is also exciting because I've never been! - and then I've got a couple more projects lined up for _It_ that will once again be overwhelmingly Reddie-centric.

Patty volunteers to drive the truck before they’ve even finished loading it and the trailer with all the supplies they can get together in a rush. She’s never driven anything this big before, but she wants the challenge for the distraction it provides. She doesn’t even have to look at Stanley to know he’ll want to join her in the cab, no further questions asked. The only one who looks like he wants to protest is Eddie, if he weren’t busy scrambling to make sure Bill and Mike are okay.

He doesn’t know what to look for – none of them do – but Patty learns later that he still manages to fill nearly half an hour with exhaustive questions and everything from reflex tests to the same kinds of things he’s been doing with Richie before he’s finally satisfied that their encounter with that thing, if it was even a thing, hasn’t left them with any lingering damage.

She learns that from Richie, who seems to pick up on her distress almost as quickly as Stanley does. He doesn’t talk to her about it, which is a little puzzling, but she suspects his enthusiastic conversation is meant to serve as another distraction when she’s finally too tired to continue her shift behind the wheel.

She’s almost sure it is when she catches a glimpse of Eddie smiling at him. Richie doesn’t see it; Patty is almost sure he isn’t meant to.

It’s easy to forget about it, regardless, because Richie is busy telling her a story about Stanley’s  _ bar mitzvah.  _ The way Richie tells it, he was the only other one there, but Ben and Beverly still interrupt a few times to correct various details, all while Stanley himself hides broad smiles behind sheets and blankets as he goes on making the remainder of the beds.

“I didn’t say ‘screw it,’ I said ‘fuck it,’” he corrects at one point, and Patty squeals with laughter. Just to picture it, and the grounding he was handed and then proceeded to ignore – her darling husband has always had a wild streak, then, and she’s delighted to hear it from the people who knew him best.

Even if she weren’t enjoying their stories – ill-fated escapades, broken windows and well-earned detentions – she’d still enjoy sitting in the close quarters of the RV, inconvenient though they may be in some ways, just watching Stanley put the beds and some of their hastily stowed supplies in order.

She could live a thousand years and never fully explain why she finds his meticulousness so very soothing. 

Mike is driving for the time being, Bill still glued to his side, armed with a map highlighted with several possible routes to New York – in case of roadblocks, or worse – courtesy of Eddie.

Stanley has five beds done and two to go when he strides back over to her and Richie and plops an armload of sheets down in Richie’s lap.

“Aw, Staniel, don’t tell me you want me to risk injuring myself on that low ceiling,” Richie says innocently. He wobbles a little rising to his feet with his arms wrapped around the folded bundle, but doesn’t really hesitate to do so.

“No, I just think the sooner you go to bed the sooner the rest of us can, too,” Stanley says.

Patty smiles over the way Stanley reaches out to help keep Richie steady on his feet when they go over a rough spot in the road. He does it before Eddie can leave his spot at the table, though he does look up like he has half a mind to, anyway. He’s been sitting there for quite a while, alternating between poring over maps and staring morosely out the window. Patty thinks he’s feeling hurt that Richie called dibs on the only bed that’s definitely too small to be shared, the one hanging over the bed of the truck. 

“Oh, we made that one already,” Beverly tells them. “It just needs a topsheet.”

“No way Richie’s gonna waste time putting one of those on,” Eddie says peevishly.

“You got me there,” Richie agrees. “So I guess we’ll save concussion number two for another day.”

“Just don’t sit up in the middle of the night and smash your head on the ceiling,” Stanley says.

“I can sleep with a helmet on if it’ll make you guys feel better,” Richie says, already heading back toward the front of the trailer.

“If we had one, you’d already be wearing it,” Eddie replies sarcastically. He pauses, setting down his highlighter with a sigh. Richie slows to a brief stop beside him. “If you change your mind…”

He glances in the direction of the rollaway bed and doesn’t finish his sentence. 

Patty can’t see Richie’s reaction to that, but he does linger beside the table long enough to ruffle Eddie’s hair. Eddie bats Richie’s hand away, Richie laughs, and then he calls out a good night to the rest of them, plus a softer one just for Eddie.

It reminds Patty, oddly enough, of the gift she has stowed away for Stanley in the miniature bedroom at the rear end of the trailer. It’s a little thing, but a little thing will do. Having remembered it, she’s so excited to surprise him with it that she probably ruins some of the surprise with her own newfound enthusiasm for the unfair distribution of space here. 

Sure,  _ someone _ has to take the largest bed the trailer has to offer, but if Patty had been back here to help decide who, she would have had them all draw straws. She still might, if it takes them a long time to settle in someplace safe.

(The upside, of course, is that it’s really the only private space they’ll have to make love while they’re out on the road – but that’s for later, when she can be sure they won’t still be overheard.)

She waits until Stanley is washing up in the bathroom before she sneaks over to one of the room’s narrow cabinets and pulls the brightly wrapped bundle out from between a pair of towels. She hides it under her pillow just in the nick of time, but not fast enough to pull off the innocent look she gives Stanley when he slips back in through the right-hand door, mumbling something sleepy about how inefficient it is to build in two doors rather than just allowing for a few inches of space between the foot of the bed and the wall.

He trails off when he sees her there, a smile growing on his face, matching hers. He flops onto the bed, and it thuds heavily against the wall – note to self. Patty erupts into a fit of giggles when Stanley frowns over it.

“We can wedge a pillow in there,” she tells him, breathless still.

His cheeks pink, and he says, “Like that one?”

He’s pointing to the one Patty is currently smooshing under her elbow; she shifts to get some of the pressure off it and stifles more laughter when the wrapping paper crinkles softly in protest.

“I’m sleeping on this one,” she lies, like she doesn’t steal over to Stanley most nights to share his pillow. It’s softer, she always tells him, like they don’t buy two identical pillows every time they get new ones. It smells like him, she knows he knows, and she likes to press their foreheads together so that the very first thing she wakes up to every day is his sleeping face. 

She’ll have to see if the Losers Club have any stories about Stanley’s heavy sleeping. Another note to self.

“It sounds uncomfortable,” Stanley says, playing along. “Maybe we forgot to remove the tag.”

“It’s very comfortable, actually,” Patty tells him, beckoning him over. He peppers her neck and jaw with kisses as he comes, but he doesn’t sink back onto the bed beside her. She makes him wait just a little longer, not one to pass on the opportunity to play with his curls when they’re in such easy reach, but eventually she reaches back behind her and pulls out the package, pleased to see that their light roughhousing hasn’t messed up the bright orange-and-yellow paper.

Stanley accepts it with another quiet laugh before he finally rolls onto his side next to her. He needs both hands to get past the heavy layer of tape Patty’s covered it in; try as she might, she never could wrap a gift as neatly as she does the cork bulletin boards in her classroom; for Stanley, she always uses a little too much tape, just to see the amused twinkle in his eyes. He’s never once caved and used scissors on anything she’s wrapped for him, and she doubts he ever will.

When he sees the short stack of pocket field guides Patty’s been discreetly amassing – the better to ensure that they, like the rest of their small library, don’t go untouched and unloved for what could be a very long time – he gasps softly.

“Babylove,” he breathes. “How did you find all these?”

“Eddie and Richie helped,” she admits—“But I found the most. That one, too.”

He’s holding up the one with a drawing of three brightly colored birds perched together on a leafy branch. Old, maybe outdated, but then, birds can’t have changed too much since the eighties.

“My dad had this one,” Stanley says, tracing the bright blue back of one of the birds with a nostalgic smile. “Wore it down until you could hardly read the title.” He pauses, turning the next book over in his hands – a guide to medicinal plants. “Was this one Eddie?” he asks with an amused smile.

She nods. “He said it’ll get Richie off your back about hunting the birds in the other books.”

Stanley snorts, but he’s already gone back to studying his father’s book, paging through and pausing to tell her little things about some of the birds – sometimes about how he remembers seeing them, sometimes about how this or that page had a coffee stain or water damage, from a sudden rainstorm they’d failed to notice was brewing.

They laugh about lots of old childhood memories – from birdwatching to bug-catching summers, playing in irrigation ditches and a whole host of other moderately dangerous activities they probably shouldn’t have done, only some of which their parents knew about.

“You would’ve fit right in back then, too,” Stanley laughs, finally setting the small stack of books aside. He turns them so they can read the spines, probably without even realizing he’s doing it.

“I think I fit in now, too,” Patty says with more than a hint of pride.

“Everyone loves you,” Stanley agrees. “But not as much as I do.”

Patty kisses him in lieu of an answer, and he rubs absently at her arm, only pausing long enough to gently thumb away a few tears that slip out. They’re like drops of coffee escaping an overfilled mug, like a cube of ice melting in a glass. Stanley’s steadfast presence doesn’t exactly erase her grief at not having been able to help – this time, only this time, he whispers to her, because there will be more people to help, down the line – but he does make it more bearable.

“Do you think things will be even more dangerous for our children?” she asks, finally drowsy enough that the question slips out easily. There are so many questions wrapped up in that one, none of which either of them can hope to answer now. 

“We’ll just have to make it safe for them,” Stanley says. “Right?”

Patty smiles at him, feels the trailer dip gently beneath them, like a boat on the open sea, and whispers her answer into the open palm of Stanley’s hand.

-*-

What  _ could _ have been barely over a five or six hour drive to Manhattan quickly turns into a long series of not-so-shortcuts, which is both the best and worst possible thing for Eddie’s fraying nerves.

On the one hand, he’s scared – of a lot of things, like what new, fucked-up shit they’ll find lurking around every New York street corner, or what it’ll actually feel like to officially cut ties with his old life. He’s kind of already started to think of his marriage as  _ before _ , but that does a pretty awful disservice to the  _ after,  _ because no matter how badly he manages to fuck up his friendship with Richie in a few days, he’s sure he’ll still be glad to have whatever’s left. And the entire Losers Club, besides. There’s so much more to it than the end of the world.

But he’s still scared to make the transition as complete as it possibly can be, and when he gets scared, he freezes. It’s tempting to just stay frozen, even now in a situation where change is basically unavoidable, one way or another. He has to keep reminding himself that he’s not just running back to  _ before  _ any more than he’s running away.

On the other hand, he can only psych himself up to rip the bandaid off so many times. Even though he feels like he owes Myra this much, at the very least, and maybe more than he can actually offer her. Even though he owes it to himself. Even though he  _ knows  _ this is the last bandaid…

…Well, the second to last, he thinks for the dozenth time, eyeing Richie, careful not to turn his head enough to make it obvious.

At the moment, Richie’s lounging at the table with his back half-turned to Eddie, staring absentmindedly out the window. If anyone were to ask, Eddie could probably give a pretty accurate estimate of how many minutes and seconds it’s been since Richie gave up on finding the walkie talkies Eddie’s pretty well convinced they never actually packed in the first place.

That’s how distracting he is, which is mildly infuriating. That he never fully realized why before. 

“Something on my face?”

Eddie jumps, his temper rising with the blood that rushes to his cheeks. “Yeah, right here,” he snaps, reaching across the table to poke at Richie just north of his newly-uncovered cut. 

It’s looking a lot better, healing about as cleanly as it was ever likely to without the help of a real doctor.

Richie blinks once before breaking into a grin. “I think I can pull it off.”

“At least it helps fill out that billboard forehead,” Eddie retorts. 

He might worry a little that he’s gone too far with that one, except that Richie just laughs, so no, actually, he doesn’t.

But then Richie sighs with obviously feigned nonchalance and says, “Guess I’m just not – you’re just not into the rugged tough guy look.” He’s turned back to the window, but he’s doing that thing he  _ always  _ does when he’s trying very hard to look less tense than he actually is. He may have gotten a lot better at his stupid(ly cute) impressions, but he’s as bad at acting as ever.

Eddie opens his mouth with every intention of telling him that, a), he’s not that rugged, but b) Eddie never said he wasn’t into him anyway.

He closes it again just as fast, because he has a  _ plan  _ for this. He can’t just throw it out the window. He’s not  _ ready  _ to, and he’s painfully aware of their friends potentially listening in. Maybe not Mike, who focuses on the books he reads with a single-minded intensity the likes of which Eddie has never seen in anyone else, but the others? 

Changing the subject is a lot harder than it should be, but Eddie manages it with a conspicuously delayed comment about how people think Boris Karloff is hot, “and you actually don’t look anything like him – which is good.”

“‘People,’ huh,” Richie says, his smile a little too tight to be genuine. Uneasy.

Eddie feels his chest tighten. “Or women, whatever,” he mutters with a shrug and a quick, dismissive wave of his hand. “Quit fishing for compliments if you’re gonna be picky about it.”

“Please,” Richie huffs, sounding almost winded, “if I wanted to fish for compliments I’d just ask Patty – right?” He winks over at her, knocking the wind out of Eddie in an entirely different way. Patty returns his overdone, flirtatious smile with an amused one of her own. 

“You’re like a cooler version of Harry Potter,” she offers unexpectedly genuinely. “Or Kurt Russell in that Carpenter movie.”

“Did he have a scar?” Eddie wonders. 

“Well, he had an eyepatch,” Patty assures them.

“Yeah, Eddie, he had an eyepatch,” Richie echoes. “Jeez, at least one person here has the right idea.”

“You’re spoiling him, Pats,” Stanley says without glancing up from his book. Eddie hasn’t had the heart to try reading any of the things Mike picked up for him yet, but it’s promising to see someone as picky as Stan enjoying his selections. 

Patty laughs and nudges Stan’s leg with her foot, effectively leaving Eddie to pick right back up where he and Richie left off – which, as Richie would have it, is in the middle of a discussion of scars in movies. He’s evidently decided he has a vested interest in the trend toward giving most of them to villains, and he’s bound and determined to make them all listen to an impassioned speech about it, followed by a long list of “grudgingly”-acknowledged exceptions to the rule.

Not for the first time, Eddie wonders where he stores all that movie trivia. The same place he stores all the other silly pop cultural references and anecdotes that make him so funny, Eddie supposes.

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in everything Richie has to say, and just like that the momentary awkwardness that had sprung up between them gives way to more easy banter.

It’s not as if Eddie can’t still identify a touch of Richie’s habitual obfuscation in it; he’s just willing to let it slide this time. He’s not that much of a hypocrite, after all, and besides, he suspects his friend isn’t completely ignorant of how soothing his presence is, loud voice, bad jokes and all. Eddie’s sure he hasn’t been as subtle about his anxiety as he’d like to think, and if anyone was going to notice and try to do something about it, it’d be Richie, every time.

-*-

The buildings that crowd the horizon ahead of them might as well be the spires of a cursed castle from some old fairytale. Beverly feels trapped by them even before they’ve entered the city limits, and that’s in spite of the fact that she’s the one behind the wheel.

A particularly vengeful corner of her mind wishes this city had gone the way of Derry, washed away and buried under the weight of its own crumbling foundations – if it had to go either way. 

Some of it is still on fire even now, but they don’t have to weave their way very far into the city to figure out that fire is probably the only light source they’ll have to rely on when the sun goes down. Thank god for the flashlights they found.

If only they’d managed to scrounge a few more spare bullets, too. Beverly doesn’t get to see how Eddie takes the sight of scattered, fatally injured, no longer bleeding bodies lurching along with their eyes fixed on nothing, but she doesn’t really need to see to know.

There are more of them here than there were in small-town Maine, of course, but when their hulking truck-and-trailer is finally forced to roll to a stop a stone’s throw from Manhattan, they still haven’t seen as many zombies as you’d expect to see in New York City.

The look Bev and Ben exchange says it all even before she swings the driver’s door open to fight their way back to the trailer entrance: this has ‘bad idea’ written all over it.

Ben climbs over the center console to follow her, armed with the shingle remover he found in the garage of a house with a recently redone roof that looked, as he put it, like a less than stellar DIY project. The tool resembles a fusion of a rake and a garden hoe, with sharp, jagged edges instead of long, flimsy tines. It’s an odd thing for anyone as gentle as Ben to hold as a weapon, and true to form, he doesn’t turn the bladed end on any of the zombies that shamble up to them on their way back; he just takes advantage of the device’s length to keep them at a safe distance. 

Bill greets them at the door with a grim look and then rushes to make sure that it’s shut and locked tight. Behind him, Mike is hunched over a box that either fell or was taken down from the overhead storage rack it had been sitting on before. At the other end of the trailer Stan, Patty and Richie are busy trying to console Eddie. 

Even as Beverly watches, Eddie goes from pacing in front of the rollaway to collapsing back onto the cushions with his head in his hands, then rinse and repeat.

“I can’t,” he keeps saying. “I fucking can’t.”

“Change of plans?” Ben says almost hopefully. 

Eddie jolts a little, caught again between sitting and standing. He shakes his head like he’s trying to shake off a thought he’d rather not have. “I have to go.”

“So we’ll go with you,” Richie says in a tone that just screams ‘we’ve been arguing in circles about this for several minutes.’

“I can’t let – I can’t ask you to do that!  _ Especially _ not the jackass with the fucking concussion,” Eddie snaps in the same tone.

“Why, scared I’ll take out more zombies than you on the”—

“We live on the eighteenth fucking floor, can you even”—

“Whoa,  _ hey,” _ Beverly snaps. Having everyone’s attention instantly redirected to her somehow bolsters her confidence – not that there’s any room for doubt here, anyway. “No one is going out there alone, Eddie.”

“We’ve told him,” Stan says.

“It’s not how we do things,” Mike agrees, finally straightening up and toeing the still-open box out of the way as he goes. He’s holding an axe in one hand and a plastic sack of flashlights in the other. 

“Do you guys even know how many people there are, or – or  _ were,  _ in this city? More than any other city in the country! It’s like, seven or eight million!”

“A-all the more reason to go with a group,” Bill says, already having gravitated back to Mike’s side. “Mikey and I are c-coming, too. Richie”—

“Also coming,” Richie interrupts, finally going from staring Eddie down to doing the same to Bill, no less intensely for the greater distance between them. “You guys can either get used to it now or watch me filibuster this shit until you do.”

“Are you sure that’s the best idea?” Ben asks anyway. He looks like he expects the answer he gets before he’s finished his sentence.

“Better than sliced bread.”

“Rich, please,” Eddie says, going from vehement to supplicating in a second. He makes a grab for Richie’s wrist and tries unsuccessfully to drag him down to the seat beside him. Beverly can see the struggle to explain himself play out in real time on his face; the only reason she doesn’t try to help is that she doubts she could come up with anything, either, and they all know Richie won’t let himself be reasoned out of this.

“I won’t slow you guys down,” Richie offers, matching Eddie’s quiet gravity for a moment. “I’m not an idiot, okay, I’ll be more help out there than holding down the fort here.”

Eddie’s frown deepens. He rises to his feet beside Richie and releases his wrist to clap a hand to his shoulder. The entire exchange is stiff, nervous. “Bullshit – but, fine. Just don’t you dare get bitten by anything or I swear I’ll wring your fucking neck myself.”

“You go for the head,” Richie reminds him with a grin. “Not the neck.”

“Beep beep, Rich,” Mike says with a pointed glance at Eddie, who looks about ready to combust. 

The rest of it is easy to figure out. Richie, Eddie, Bill and Mike get to work packing weapons and other basics for the long walk there – Mike’s flashlights, Eddie’s first-aid supplies, enough food and water to last them a night or two, just in case they can’t immediately make it back, and so on. Beverly is impressed all over again by Mike’s careful system for organizing the wild assortment of things they’ve picked up along the way; they make short work of it, almost shorter than the time it takes her to settle on staying here with Ben, Stan and Patty.

It makes sense, despite the temptation to make sure nothing goes wrong on the most dangerous side of things. Four is enough people watching each other’s backs, but five is a crowd, and they all know Stan and Patty aren’t equipped to fight if it comes down to that. If anyone is still around to, as Richie puts it, “go full  _ Escape from New York  _ on you guys,” they’re gonna need someone who can do a little more to fend them off.

Besides, she can admit she’d be just as stubborn as Richie if it came to that; she doesn’t want to have to wonder if Ben is okay.

Patty watches Stanley slide onto the bench at the table with his binoculars poised to look off down the street they’re stopped in. The traffic isn’t as bad as the wreckage of several minor car crashes; if their vehicle were smaller, they might’ve made it farther.

Ben is clearly thinking along the same lines. “If you guys get a chance, it would be a lot safer to grab a car.”

“Let’s make it a yellow taxi,” Richie says. “It’s just not New York if you don’t ride in one at least once, right?”

“Spoken like a true tourist,” Eddie tells him. Beverly cracks a smile at that.

“I’ll have you know I’ve been working every time I’ve come to this city,” Richie says. “That’s technically not tourism.”

“And people paid for that?” Eddie says, feigning surprise. “Here?”

“Lots,” Richie says smugly.

Patty smiles along with them, but she looks distracted. Her gaze lingers on Stan until it flicks back to Beverly. 

“When this is over,” she says, “and everyone’s safe, would you teach me how to shoot?”

Stanley lowers his binoculars in surprise; they clink against the glass, and for a moment Beverly expects the sound to be followed by the wet slap of a decaying hand hitting the other side of it.

“Sure,” she responds, making a mental note to use the time they have now to at least show her how the gun works, assuming she doesn’t have some idea already.

“Not to kill,” Patty says, meeting Stanley’s eyes. “To protect.”

_ That’s sometimes the same thing, _ Beverly thinks, but Patty knows that, and Beverly knows that it’s a lot easier to imagine shooting than it is to imagine shooting  _ someone.  _ A lot easier to learn if you don’t have to dwell on the worst possibilities.

“You guys be careful out there,” Stan tells their group’s second half when they’re all gathered by the front entrance, post- Eddie insisting that Mike trade his axe out for one of the many bats they’ve accumulated, “Because I really don’t think any of us wants a mouthful of zombie blood, and that thing’s gonna create so much more splatter,” which of course ends with him gagging and Richie giving his hand a reassuring squeeze that probably none of them fails to notice.

He doesn’t let go until Bill shoves the door open; Eddie and Bev exchange one final glance, hers as encouraging as she can possibly make it, his scared but determined. 

“Go get ‘em,” she says, leaning into Ben’s arm around her waist, away from the crack of a bat connecting with a body as Bill all but trips out onto the asphalt. 

Richie shoves the door shut behind them, but it doesn’t latch until Ben jerks forward to pull it the rest of the way shut. 

And then they wait.

They wait with the same kind of tension that hangs over a hospital waiting room, minus the oppressive silence. Beverly doesn’t know which is worse – the constant cacophony of guttural vocalizations, air whistling through ruined lungs, feet shuffling, broken bits of buildings finally losing their fight against gravity, or the thousand-ton quiet of a doctor’s office. At least here, Beverly is able to crack a window open for a smoke, and they know no one is hurt, at least not yet. At least—

“There’s something coming,” Stanley says, hours into his off-and-on vigil by various windows of the trailer. Beverly lowers her gun to the table midway through an explanation to Patty about how the safety works. It’s still on, but she lets her finger hover by it even as she goes to take the proffered binoculars from Stan, flanked on either side by Patty and Ben, who notices the instant Beverly recognizes the figure behind the wheel of the approaching sedan. 

She’s never seen the car before, any more than she’s seen the man sitting beside him in the front passenger seat. It’s normal like the man in red’s car was normal, and the driver’s eyes are wrong like the man in red’s eyes were wrong.

His beard has grown longer in the weeks since she last saw him. It takes until the car is close enough that the binoculars can pick out individual flecks of blood on his face for Beverly to force her frozen limbs to move. She turns her own face away from the window an instant before she draws the others back with her, gun still in hand.

“We have to go,” she says, but they don’t have time to get behind the wheel of the truck, and they might not make it on foot. 

“Maybe we can talk to them,” Patty suggests, wide-eyed. “They might not be bad people.”

“Bev?” Ben says. She can hardly hear him over the thundering of her own pulse. 

“We can’t talk to them,” Beverly says, realizing belatedly that she’s still clinging hard to Ben’s wrist. She doesn’t let go. He doesn’t pull away. The car screeches to a body-thudding halt just shy of the trailer, and several car doors slam open and closed, unaccompanied by any voices.

There’s no greeting, either, just a heavy  _ thump-thump-thump  _ against the door Eddie and the others slipped through hours ago. For a moment Beverly reels from the realization that they’d been headed in the same direction this car just came from, and she wouldn’t be able to speak through that dread if she dared.

She barely has time to cock her gun before the man on the other side of the door gives it a harsh kick, and it gives visibly before settling back against its frame. 

Beside her, Patty takes a step back to latch onto Stanley, shielding him and pushing him back against the opposite wall.

The second kick bows the door even farther inward, and Beverly finally collects herself enough to gesture at everyone else to get down.

Ben is the only one who doesn’t. It’s his hands on her shoulders that keep her steady on her feet when the door finally gives under the full weight of its assailant, and she comes face to face with Tom, bloody-knuckled and smiling that wolf’s smile he used to only wear behind closed doors. 

“Well, well, so they were right,” he says, clearing the steps while three more men linger not far behind him. Waiting, watching. 

Beverly hesitates just long enough to miss her first shot.

Tom’s body hits her hard, drives her back against the couch and knocks her off her feet. She gets one foot up between them and kicks, but she’s the one with the wind knocked out of her, and Tom backs up too far to feel the full force she’s still able to muster. 

She can’t hear anything but a muffled ringing, but she can  _ see  _ Tom tackle Ben to the floor, teeth bared and hands moving to his throat. She doesn’t have to hear the vile shit he’s saying to know he’s saying it, and she doesn’t need any more provocation than that. 

She thinks  _ Get the fuck off of him,  _ but her scream is a cry of inarticulate rage followed by a shot to the hand Tom raises to strike.

She hits her mark and doesn’t let the fact that he doesn’t even flinch throw her off. She’s on her feet again, and Ben is looking up at her, pointing, mouthing something she doesn’t hear while she lunges at them.

A hand tightens in her hair, pulling hard enough to hurt and throwing her off her balance before she can deliver a second kick to Tom’s unguarded back.

She turns just enough to fire, and her third bullet loosens the front-seat man’s grip enough that she manages to pull free. It sends him stumbling back into another, who instead of catching him just shoves him to the side, out of his way, unbothered by the blood that gushes from the wound to his chest. He doesn’t get back up, and Beverly doesn’t need a fourth shot to shove the third man and his tourist-shirt-wearing friend back down the steps and into the grasping hands of a zombie.

Clearly the zombies, at least, are outside of It’s children’s control. That, or they just want nothing with these strangers.

In a moment of bizarre clarity, Beverly thinks that if they could have, they would have looked more surprised by the fall. Tom would never have told them how strong she could be. She doubts he ever had to explain the massive lump on the back of his head, to them or anyone else.

By the time she whips back around to face Tom and Ben, Stan and Patty both have the former’s hands pinned to his side. They’re clearly struggling, but they’ve bought Ben enough time to wiggle free of Tom’s vicious kicking.

He looks like he’s in pain, but Beverly can’t tell where he’s hurt.

She knows where Tom is about to be hurt. Ben gives her an urgent look before she has a clear shot, but she doesn’t take it until she can be sure she won’t hit him, too. It gives Tom the time he needs to shake Patty and Stan off, but that’s all the time she lets him have. 

In the silence that follows that fourth and final shot, Beverly sinks to her knees and doesn’t move again for so long that by the time she registers Ben’s arms around her, Stan and Patty have managed to jam the door roughly back in place, held there by the broom that came with the trailer, plus Ben’s improvised weapon. She watches them strip the cushions from the rollaway bed and shove them against the door, too, blocking the stairwell about as well as they’re capable of for the moment. 

Gradually, the ringing in Beverly’s ears dies into a constant background hum, and she realizes she’s not crying as silently as she thought.

“Can you stand?” Ben asks lightly when she straightens up to look at him. He hasn’t stopped drawing the same short, sharp breaths she is, but his crying is quiet, slow, and by the looks of it, finished.

“He hurt you,” Beverly breathes. “Where?”

“Ben’s hurt?” Stan repeats, coming to kneel beside them. Ben doesn’t brush him off until his hand reaches his ribcage, and then he flinches.

“Ribs,” he hisses. “I think. He just – hit it wrong. I’m okay. It’s not too bad.”

“I’ll get some ice,” Patty says, pausing on her way to the freezer to give Beverly a quick hug of her own. There’s blood on her cheeks, Beverly notices numbly. On Stan’s, too, and on the front of Ben’s shirt, which of course means it’s rubbed off on her. She can feel it stinging her eyes, so she thinks – small mercies. That these men were monsters, but not the kind that spreads through blood and bodily fluids.

She doesn’t have to tell them who Tom was. She doesn’t have to ask for help moving his body out of the trailer, through the only undamaged door remaining, and no one tries to suggest that they do more than leave his body to the hungry things lumbering past. 

They check the car her ex-husband arrived in and find it empty. It’s not a guarantee, but Beverly has to hope that their friends managed to avoid them on their way out.

The keys are still in the ignition; they leave them there, doors unlocked, and no one says it, but Beverly is sure they’re all thinking the same thing. That if Bill and Mike and Richie and Eddie aren’t back by tonight or tomorrow, the day after at worst, they can take this car to find them.

Fuck waiting around.

That night, in the uneasy quiet and dimming light, Beverly sits beside Ben until his shallow breathing evens out, and then she eases past Stan and Patty and the almost-clean floor and walls, shiny now with layer upon layer of soapy water – better than blood, and definitely better than letting Eddie come back to anything that unsanitary – and the door to their single cramped bathroom closes with a soft click behind her.

She uses a hunting knife to cut her hair short, and the only thing more satisfying than the easy progress that clean, sharp blade makes is her reflection when she’s done.

It’s messy and ugly and precisely the kind of  _ boyish _ that would have irritated her father. It’s also the first time in years she’s felt so completely like herself,  _ hers,  _ and she knows Tom wouldn't have recognized her like this in time to dodge that first bullet. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a good thing nothing could possibly go wrong on Richie, Eddie, Bill and Mike's end, too! That would be terrible.


	9. Apocalypse Divorce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may or may not have noticed I've added several new tags to this work that function as warnings. If you'd like a fun surprise, don't look at them, but if you'd like to be on the safe side, _check the end notes on this chapter for a content warning before reading!_

“Wish we could at least call everyone, see if they’re okay,” Eddie says, watching Richie steal another quick glance at his phone before pocketing it just as swiftly. Unexpectedly, Eddie’s been the more talkative of the two these past couple of hours; Richie’s occasional chatter has been mostly limited to responses to their friend’s nervous rambling, give or take a few quips about some of the busted-up shops they pass by, landmarks they can’t forget to stop and see, etc.

None of it has been loud or frequent enough to get them in serious trouble yet, but Bill can tell Mike is just as tempted as he is to shush the both of them. One of them probably would have done it already if they didn’t think it was helping keep Eddie’s jumpiness down to a minimum.

The humor of Richie’s reply is largely offset by his startle reaction to the sudden clatter of something getting kicked, maybe, across the asphalt behind a line of cars to their right.

“Zombies are probably tying up the network.”

Eddie holds his wrench – which doesn’t look anything like any wrench Bill’s ever seen, not that he doubts Eddie’s expertise in the area – out like one of those rotating bars that secure the entrances to amusement parks, unsubtly putting himself between Richie and the source of the sound. 

“We’d b-better hurry,” Bill says, eager to avoid as much fighting as possible for as long as possible. His right arm has had a sharp twinge for most of the walk, ever since he took one particularly poorly controlled swing at a corpse Mike hadn’t seen coming for him.

They take a detour, a sort of semi-circle path that takes them well around someone’s persistent security alarm. It’s loud enough that they hear it from a block or two away – far enough that they don’t see the crowd of zombies it’s more than likely attracted, and all the better.

Bill only realizes he’s started rubbing absentmindedly at his arm when Mike covers his hand with his own. Bill laces their fingers together, forgetting for a moment the heavy, acrid scent of smoke that only seems to grow heavier the farther they go.

“Did you pull something?”

“Maybe,” Bill says. “Probably.” 

Eddie glances back at them, his brow creased. “Do we need to stop? I have cold packs and sports tape.”

“He has more shit in his backpack than that entire pharmacy over there,” Richie chuckles, gesturing vaguely at a storefront just ahead. It’s locked up tight behind a security gate and practically untouched by the scattered wreckage around it, assuming nothing got in through another entrance.

Eddie squints at it, stepping out of line with the rest of their group to get a better look. “I think I know that place.”

“I don’t need to stop,” Bill says, not quite sure anyone was still waiting for an answer until Mike gives his arm a worried squeeze.

“Does that mean we’re getting close?”

Eddie sighs. It doesn’t seem like it releases any tension at all. “Yeah.”

Richie pats him on the back, narrowly avoiding tripping on someone’s hastily discarded purse in the process. Eddie catches him, only to stumble over something else beside a car with a cracked windshield, the cause of which is nowhere to be seen. It’s facing the wrong way in the middle of this one-way street, although it’s far from the only one. 

Richie doesn’t manage to catch Eddie, but he does break his fall with a sharp cry and muffled thud. The wrench hits the ground with a deafening clang.

The noise alone would have been enough to cause an adrenaline spike, but Bill’s view of the space under the car is newly cleared at the same time, and he’s far enough back with Mike that he can’t do anything about the bloodied hand circling Eddie’s ankle.

Or the gnashing teeth coming dangerously close to joining it.

“Eddie”—

“Fuck –  _ fuck”— _

Richie is already hauling Eddie as far out of the way as he can – up onto his own chest, holding tight, his eyes wide and panicked, and Eddie doesn’t seem to need the visual confirmation to know what Richie’s seeing. He does his best to kick himself free, but only really succeeds in making Richie’s job harder.

Bill dives straight for the hand on Eddie’s leg and finds it slicker than he expected. He jerks his fingers back just in time to avoid the snap of jaws dripping wet with saliva, then goes right back to trying to pry the thing loose. 

“Bill, don’t, it could”—

“Bill,” Mike says, “let go,” and Bill does, and in the next instant the side of his head is covered in bits of gore, and maybe because his first response is to gag, Eddie’s attention refocuses on him almost instantly, a panicked onslaught of  _ did you swallow anything, did it get in your eyes, Bill what the fuck why would you just  _ touch _ one of those – _

“I-I’m fine, I’m fine,” Bill promises. “Eddie?”

No response needed – Richie has already yanked the hem of Eddie’s jeans up hard enough to tear the seams. Aside from the damage to his pants, he’s unharmed.

That only goes so far toward calming Richie down, though. He lets Eddie pull away from him with impressive reluctance, and even then he still gives Eddie an additional once-over, revealing scrapes all the way up his own forearms in the process. “Are you okay?”

“Am  _ I  _ okay,” Eddie snaps, “when you’re walking around with those open wounds now? Fuck this, we’re getting out of here and we’re stopping someplace safe and you’re getting that shit covered up before it gets infected.  _ Please _ tell me you didn’t also hit your head.”

“I didn’t,” Richie promises. He lets Eddie help him up anyway, while Mike does the same for Bill. 

Mike also insists on getting a clean towel from Eddie’s pack before they start moving, and not a moment too soon, if the approaching stamp and slow drag of feet on pavement is anything to go by. 

He cleans the blood from Bill’s face as they move, reminding him again and again not to lick his lips or touch his eyes, and as luck would have it, they don’t have any more close calls – or find any other certainly safe, easily accessible buildings – until Eddie draws them all to a halt in front of a tidy, impressively tall apartment building.

Like many of the larger buildings in the area, this one looks mostly fine on the outside. Its high brick walls saved it from sustaining any worse than some black scorch marks on the side facing the burnt skeleton of a shorter, older building, and there’s one broken window on an upper level that Bill can see. That’s all.

Richie whistles. “Here?”

Eddie eyes his home as if he expects it to come to life, too. He even takes a reflexive step back into Mike when Richie promptly jogs up the front steps and gives the double doors a sharp tug. They don’t budge.

“So, I’m assuming you brought your keys?” Richie says, turning back to them with an expectant look.

Eddie shakes his head and finally steps up to where Richie is watching him. He backs him away with one arm, shielding him in much the same way he had earlier, except this time he then drops both his hands to the torque wrench and, bracing himself, drives it hard into the glass in front of him. 

He gets a spiderweb crack for his efforts, while the rest of them just look on in dumbfounded silence.

“It was in my wallet,” he says, trying and failing to bite back a proud smile. “And the whole system’s electric, anyway.”

“Oh, I’m so helping with this,” Richie says, breaking into his own toothy grin. He raises his bat alongside Eddie, and together they make a second attempt to break in the glass, only marginally more successful than the first.

Bill and Mike exchange an amused look and move up to join them, though Mike gives Bill a gentle warning to take it easy on his injured arm.

“Jesus, what is this place made out of?” Richie pants when the four of them finally succeed on a third, fourth,  _ fifth _ go. The glass breaks inward, shattering with a deafening crash. Eddie is smiling madly, breathing hard and almost laughing.

“Myra picked it,” he says, “because it was safe.”

“New York City, an impressively safe city known for its low crime rate,” Richie laughs.

“It’s n-not as bad as L.A.,” Bill reminds him. 

“Or Derry,” Mike agrees.

Eddie laughs then, his shoes crunching on broken glass as he ducks under the thick metal bars that cross the middle of both doors. The rest of them follow, wary of the lumbering creatures starting to converge on their location. For the first time since they entered the city, Eddie seems less focused on them than he does on what’s ahead of them, but one thing is for sure. 

Getting out is going to be a lot more challenging than getting in.

The outside of the building may have been fine, but inside is another story. Eddie takes the lead, waiting until they’re poised in front of the door to the stairs to pull his flashlight out of a pocket on the side of his bag. Mike does the same, but Bill hadn’t made his that accessible; he and Richie waste several seconds trying to dig theirs out from under layers of fabric, bottled water, can openers and so on, until finally the crunch of too many feet on broken glass behind them forces them to give it up.

That’s their next close call, failing to find out what’s lurking in the stairwell before rushing blindly into it. 

The first thing Bill sees by the light of two flashlights is a line of blood splatter on the wall across from him. It extends beyond the outer edge of the illumination, into the impenetrable darkness beyond.

The door clicks shut behind them before he’s had enough time to process that sight, and in the same instant he hears something like the sound of someone opening their mouth to speak.

He assumes it’s Richie until he hears Mike shout in front of him. His flashlight hits the ground in front of Bill, followed by the sound of a scuffle. Sneakers squeaking against waxed concrete. Fabric rustling.

“Mike?!”

Richie reaches over to pick up the light just as the beam from Eddie’s illuminates Mike struggling between two people, one of whom looks like they’ve had their throat ripped out by a wild animal. Bill can see the remaining muscles working in what’s left of her neck as clearly as if he were looking at the anatomical model that used to sit in one corner of their science classroom in high school. 

“Oh fuck – Richie, hold that!  _ Hold it!” _

Richie raises Mike’s flashlight while Eddie drops his, acting just a second behind Bill, who grabs the larger of the two creatures and drags it off of Mike with strength he didn’t even think he had.

Of course it immediately turns around to snap at the air a mere inch or two from his bare throat. Bill is so struck by the strangeness of not being able to feel hot, damp breath against his skin that his grip loosens.

He almost closes his eyes, relieved that it at least isn’t Mike’s throat that’s about to be torn out, but he can’t bring himself to actually let go, because beneath all the snapping and growling is Mike’s voice calling him.

The sound of metal hitting bone doesn’t register until it happens again, closer this time, as the body in his hands is jerked away from him, thrown off balance so that it hits the floor a fleeting instant before Mike’s bat hits it. 

Mike’s hands replace the zombie’s moments later, coming up first to brush gently against Bill’s throat before cupping his face. Mike presses his forehead to Bill’s, still breathing hard, and he doesn’t say anything, so Bill does.

“Are you o-okay, too, Mikey?”

“I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“That’s a legit okay and not bullshit, right?” Richie cuts in. “Eds?”

“Not okay. Guys. There are more coming.”

“What the fuck do you mean, ‘not okay’?”

“I mean I’m fucking scared, Rich, can we please focus!”

Mike lets Bill go only after dropping a kiss to his forehead. Bill can still hear the reluctance in his voice when he whispers, “Please be careful. We need you.”

Bill smiles. Mike-speak for  _ I need you. _

“That g-goes double for you.”

There turn out to be two more zombies sprawled out on the ground at the center of the long, winding staircase, their legs too mangled to pose the same kind of threat as the others, plus a body whose head hadn’t survived the long fall.

As intended, maybe. Eddie turns away with a choked gasp, and none of them has the heart to ask if he recognizes them. 

“W-we should keep m-moving,” Bill says instead, heeding the scrape of fingernails on the door they’d passed through to get here and grateful that it seemed like it was made of metal much more heavy-duty than the glass out front.

It’ll hold, but they’d better hope they can find another way out – and that they don’t wind up needing another way  _ up. _

They can’t seem to go more than a flight or two at a time without encountering more zombies, thankfully scattered but clearly on their way down toward the source of the racket their group made on entering, and to make matters worse, Richie’s energy quickly starts to fail him. 

“I’m okay,” he insists when Eddie finally stops side-eyeing him – hard to miss given that every glance is accompanied by the sweep of his flashlight, never directly across Richie’s face but always close enough – and slows down to let Richie lean on him. “Eds, I’m fine, walking around like this is gonna make us look like the world’s tastiest fries-and-a-burger combo to all your fancy neighbors.”

“Then you should probably stop talking so fucking loud and focus on keeping your promise, huh, dickwad?”

Richie pauses, then murmurs something that might be an apology.

Several more muscle-jarring swings of his bat and one Eddie-mandated stop for hasty treatment of minor injuries later, Bill has to steal a glance at the floor label by the latest door to have even the faintest idea of how long and far they’ve been walking. They’re all breathing hard and leaning heavily on the metal railings, Richie especially.

“T-two more?” Bill pants. His legs feel like blades of grass.

“Four flights,” Eddie says, then hesitates for only a split second before adding, “Look, I know it’s a little late for this, but you guys don’t have to come all the way with me. She might not even be there – and if she isn’t then – then that’s enough, and I’ll let it go, but at least in here things can only come from one direction, right? So”—

“Dude, for the trillionth time, no,” Richie interrupts. “As your best friend it’s my sacred duty to get mauled by zombies  _ with _ you.”

Bill glances back and sees Eddie deflate under the arm Richie has wrapped around his shoulders. He still looks up at Bill and Mike, waiting on an answer.

“Do we even have to say it?” Mike asks Bill, pointedly exasperated, but still fond.

“I d-don’t think so,” Bill says with a smile. “But there’s not going to be any m-m – biting.”

“Yeah, no more close calls,” Richie says. He must deliver an elbow to Eddie’s ribs or something, because although Bill’s still looking at Mike with one ear turned to the path ahead of them, he hears Eddie’s breath hitch for a moment. When his answer comes on the heels of several long, quiet moments, he sounds like he’s on the verge of tears.

“If  _ any  _ of you gets hurt I’ll never fucking forgive myself.  _ Or  _ you. So.” He stops, letting the rest of his sentence fizzle out in the dark.

“Quit it,” Richie chuckles, a tad nervously, or maybe just breathlessly. “Feels like you’re jinxing us.”

“We m-made it this far,” Bill argues, but he knows well enough the kind of guilt he’d feel if any of them got killed on his watch. He feels like half of him is still back with the rest of their friends in the RV, hoping desperately that its thin metal walls will keep them all safe until they make it back.

He wishes he could make Eddie a promise, but there’s no honest way to do that.

The uneasy silence that settles over them becomes a waiting silence when they heave themselves onto Eddie’s landing. Bill and Mike let Eddie brush past them, wordlessly taking the lead again and then using it to hold them all in place by the door until even Richie’s breathing has evened out.

“Eds, if anything is on the other side, it’s probably getting tired of waiting for us.”

Eddie shines his flashlight a few feet to the left of Richie, careful to avoid blinding him. Bill’s eyes have adjusted enough by now that he can see Eddie glaring at Richie in the darkness.

“So get out of the way then.” Eddie shifts his wrench into the same hand as his flashlight, somehow managing to accommodate both objects without jiggling the beam from the light very much at all, and then he lowers his newly freed hand to the knob, twisting it just far enough to prove that it isn’t locked.

Richie drifts back to Bill’s side with a quiet sigh, not needing any more pointed looks from Eddie to follow his impatient instructions.

It’s funny – Bill would’ve expected Richie to be the one person Eddie most wanted to have with him in the midst of all this, but it’s really starting to seem like he’d rather have had just about anyone else.

There’s a narrow line of dusky white light framing the bottom of the door, same as on all the other floors. Not enough to see much by in the stairwell, but more than enough to seriously disorient them when Eddie finally shoves the door wide open and takes a short step back, weapon raised.

The hallway is empty, Bill realizes mid-flinch. His eyes water as they struggle to adjust to the return of natural light filtering in via a big window to their left. The door to the stairs falls shut to reveal rows of doors to their right, some of which are decorated with floral wreaths, welcome mats, a few variations on  _ ‘Home Sweet Home,’ _ and one unpainted garden gnome.

“Oh, is this one yours?” Richie coos when he sees it. 

“What? No, that’s…” Eddie hesitates, then shrugs a little sheepishly, leading them past it and around a corner. He takes the turn like he’s reenacting a low-rent cop show, ready to lunge either at or away from the first sign of danger, but the coast is clear and the rows of doors continue on in sepulchral silence.

“That was definitely his,” Richie stage-whispers to Mike, who smiles brightly enough to completely drown out Eddie’s answering glare.

Bill keeps his eyes on that smile for several beats longer than Richie, who takes his small victory and moves on with a hopeful side-glance at Eddie, only returning his attention to Bill and Mike when Bill decides to make his own less than successful attempt at friendly conversation.

“You don’t kn-now your next-door neighbors, Eddie?”

Mike gives him a  _ why would you say that  _ look that’s less reproachful than it is mildly impressed, while Eddie sputters his way through several excuses before settling on a simple, “Not like they know me, either.”

His tone is a lot less apathetic than the words themselves.

“What, no  _ ‘Live Laugh Love’  _ sign?” Richie wonders when Eddie draws them to a clunky, reluctant halt in front of a door with no decorations at all. The one next door has a plastic wreath hung from one of those hooks you’d use to put towels on the bathroom door. 

Eddie gives him a stonily unimpressed look and just kind of… stares at the apartment, his unoccupied hand hovering a few inches from the bare wood. 

“Feels weird to knock,” he says, “but…” He gestures weakly at the keyhole before sighing and giving the surface a few weak raps.

Richie, of course, follows that up with several deafening blows. Unless this building has pretty impressive soundproofing, Bill suspects every one of Eddie’s neighbors up and down the hall would have heard it.

Apparently, no one does; Eddie’s fidgeting intensifies the longer they spend waiting for an answer that doesn’t come. He shuffles his wrench and flashlight back and forth from hand to hand and even jumps a little when Richie reaches over to rest a hand on his shoulder.

Makes sense that Eddie wouldn’t be the sort to hide spare keys under a welcome mat, Bill supposes, quietly examining their latest obstacle. The door looks too sturdy to cave to a few baseball bats – didn’t seem to give even slightly under the abuse it took from Richie – but maybe four grown men and a lot of determination can manage it somehow.

“Maybe we could start with this,” Mike says, reaching past Eddie to grab at the knob.

“Right,” Eddie scoffs, “why didn’t I think of that. Myra wouldn’t just leave the door unlocked, that’s like – wait, really?”

The door squeaks on its hinges, swinging inward until something on the floor behind it stops it.

A sour smell like food gone bad hangs in the air, but there’s not enough ambient light in the hall to illuminate the gravelike apartment more than a few feet beyond the door. 

Eddie swallows audibly and steps over the threshold so uncertainly that if Bill didn’t know better, he’d assume it was his first time. The beam of his flashlight reveals a living room at the end of a short hallway.

Furniture, wood floors, and a few spots of dried blood leading deeper into the apartment.

“Shit,” Eddie chokes out, turning to look anywhere but at the ground.

“Don’t they have windows in New York apartments?” Richie wonders loudly enough to make them all jump. “Do you live in a literal dungeon, Eds?”

“Richie, shut the fuck up, I swear to god,” Eddie says, shushing him for good measure.

Mike and Bill turn to find several reusable grocery bags stuffed full of boxes and cartons of untouched food. Most of them have fallen over on their sides, spilling their contents across the floor.

There’s blood on the straps, too, dried and brown.

“Eddie,” Mike tries to get his attention, but Eddie just shakes his head stiffly, keeping several paces ahead of the rest of them.

“I know.”

Richie closes the distance and then some, ignoring Eddie’s protests.

“Did you hear that?” he asks.

“Now is really not the time, Rich,” Mike tells him. Bill lets him take the flashlight back without complaint; he’d rather use his free hand to keep a firm grip on Mike’s upper arm, anyway. 

“Oh,” Eddie says, stiffening further. If his hands weren’t both occupied, Bill thinks he’d be holding on to Richie, too. “I do hear that.”

Their flashlight beams settle on a closed door down another hall that stretches away from a crystal-clean kitchen, and this time Bill hears it.

It sounds like something scratching. Like slow friction against the other side of the door.

“What is that? Eddie?”

Eddie doesn’t answer; his breath is coming in short, harsh pants. He doesn’t even try to insist that Richie stay back, away from the door. He  _ does  _ try to stop him from actually touching the handle, which confuses Bill until he sees what Eddie is pointing his flashlight at.

There’s blood on the knob, and a few more tiny drops on the floor leading up to it.

“Like a trail of breadcrumbs,” Richie says dryly.

Eddie sways into Richie’s side; Richie catches him automatically, looking startled and a little confused. He starts to open his mouth – to apologize, maybe, or to ask what’s wrong, but Eddie’s still staring hard at the door, at the knob.

“Myra?”

The scratching intensifies for a moment before dying down again. Eddie looks like he might actually be crying, but it’s a little hard to tell in the low light. 

“Now would be a good time to tell us you have a dog,” Richie mumbles. “Or a really big hamster.”

Eddie starts to wrap an arm around Richie, but stops short, his hand frozen in midair and never quite touching. “We – no. No pets.”

Richie doesn’t seem to notice. “Eds…”

“Eddie,” Bill says, carefully. “M-maybe we should think about”—

Eddie cuts him off with another sharp shake of his head. “No, I – I know. I know. I just – I have to. I can’t just leave her, if – if. I can’t.” He draws a shaky breath, in and out. “You guys don’t have to help with this part, okay? It’s my – it’s something I have to do.”

Bill looks at Richie, sure he’ll be able to help him talk Eddie out of going ahead with whatever  _ it  _ is.

(Bill thinks he knows, though – just like they all know what’s waiting behind that door.)

Richie gives Bill an apologetic look in return.

“Okay, Eds,” he says. “How are we doing this?”

Eddie is  _ definitely  _ crying, trembling against Richie’s larger frame. “Not we, Rich. Just me.”

“Fuck that,” Richie retorts. His words are underscored by another flurry of scratching.

Broken fingernails scraping at the lid of a coffin.

Eddie flinches. “I  _ told  _ you, I’d never”—

“I’d never get over letting your zombie ex-wife eat you alive, either!” Richie retorts, gripping Eddie just a little tighter. “Look, I know you can do this alone. You just don’t fucking have to, alright?”

“Fuck you,” Eddie hisses, pulling out of his grip to round on him. “I’m not trying to prove anything, Richie, I just know this is fucking stupid and I don’t want anyone else cleaning up my mess!”

Richie takes the outburst like a physical blow. “I know – I know, I’m sorry. But it  _ is  _ stupid, and we’re a team. And you’re – I – I want to help. I really, really do.”

He looks like he regrets the words before they’ve even left his mouth, but Bill can’t fathom what he could possibly be berating himself for. Of course he wants to help.

Mike gives Bill a searching look while Eddie fumes at Richie, letting all his fear boil over as anger.

“If it’s just one…?”

Well, they’re sure as hell not going to just wait in the hall.

“If you’re doing this,” Bill says, “y-you’re not doing it alone.”

“We’d be awful friends if we let you,” Mike says. “If you want to go ahead of us, fine.”

“Just think of it as having, like, Secret Service bodyguards,” Richie says with a hopeful little smile.

Eddie scrubs furiously at the tears on his face, still shaking his head and doing a terrible job of biting back the reluctant smile that breaks through between harsh, uneven breaths.

“You’re such a – you’d make a terrible bodyguard,” he tells Richie. “Mike, maybe.”

“Aw,” Mike says. Bill resists the temptation to ask about himself. He kind of figures he’s on the same level as Richie.

“Mike’s too nice,” Richie says.

“Clearly,” Eddie huffs. He’s shaking less, now, maybe bolstered by their promise to stay here with him.

Richie takes Eddie’s flashlight from him when he offers it to him. This smile is several degrees more relaxed, and Eddie returns it with an apologetic one of his own.

“Thank you,” he says. “You guys are all fucking idiots, but… I owe you one.”

“Hear, hear,” Richie says, obligingly taking a step back with Bill and Mike when Eddie gives them all another pointed look and kneels to pull a clean towel out of his backpack. He stows the bag against the wall, then uses the plush blue fabric as a barrier between his hand and the bloody doorknob.

The knuckles of his other hand have gone white against the wrench, he’s gripping it so hard.

Eddie drives the door open by throwing himself against it shoulder-first. For a moment Bill is impressed that he makes dislodging the body on the other side of the door look so easy, but then he hears the doorknob plunge straight into the drywall behind it.

Nothing there, again.

The curtains are drawn in the bedroom, too, and everything else about the space, from the generic abstract painting Richie and Mike catch in their flashlight beams to the carefully arranged bed, resembles a room in a hotel. It’s so ostentatiously joyless that Bill’s chest aches with something more than just anxiety. 

There is a single source of light, weak but present, filtering in via the ajar door in the corner.

“Bathroom?” Richie whispers, either a guess or a suggestion.

Eddie nods, already taking tiny, reluctant steps toward it, like he’s walking against a powerful wind. Shaking again.

He doesn’t make it all the way there by a long shot.

His back is turned, so he doesn’t see the darker shape that separates itself from the void of a walk-in closet. The rest of them do; it lurches straight for them, making anticipatory noises like chewing gum open-mouthed, and the immediate rabbity thudding of Bill’s pulse in his throat makes his voice stick there like sap. Mike goes stock-still beside him, more silent still, and Richie swears once, softly, twice, loudly, voice cracking as he trips and falls back, nearly taking the two of them with him. 

Bill drops to the ground beside him, anyway, ready to drag him back to his feet, but somehow he just as quickly finds himself face-to-face with dead, milky eyes and a mouthful of glistening, dripping teeth. Opening and closing, chewing up the thick haze of terror in the air.

“Bill – Bill”—

Richie manages to wedge his bat between himself and the thing, but in the dim half-light of their dropped flashlights, Bill can see his arms shaking with the effort of holding it up. For once he finds himself frozen, too, unable to risk pulling Richie out from under her and equally, painfully aware that a blow to a zombie’s head this close to either of them could mean a lot of fluids splattering their way into eyes and mouths.

Mike’s chest presses in against Bill’s back, and Bill sees his hands come up to help shove Myra back a few inches – not enough. 

“Get,” Eddie snarls, then, wrapping two more hands tight around the zombie’s neck – “the,” and the creature whips around to face its new attacker, jaws still snapping open and shut like a sprung trap –  _ “fuck – ow”— _

Myra-but-not-Myra knocks Eddie back several feet without managing to right herself,  _ itself,  _ in the midst of its forward plunge. The rest of them scramble forward, too, grasping and swinging and missing, and to Bill it looks like Eddie is going down again right up until his silhouette raises a length of glinting, sturdy metal up, up—

_ “Get the fuck away from them!” _

—and down, hard, hard enough that Bill can see the give, the crunch, and Eddie manages two more blows for good measure before the wrench tumbles back out of his hands.

He tumbles with it, away from Myra and the rest of them, still gasping for air like he’s drowning.

“Eddie,” Richie pants, all but vaulting over the inert figure on the ground in his rush to get to their friend. “Jesus, remind me to never get on your bad side, huh? Eds?”

Bill feels around for curtains, heavy-duty blackout ones just like the sort hotels use, and finds the edge of one just in time for Mike to draw them wide open.

By the time Bill’s managed to blink the spots from his vision, Richie is still wincing.

“Warn a guy,” he mutters.

Eddie’s only reaction is to push himself a little farther away from Richie, so that his back is against the wall and he can slump over the hand he has clutched in his lap. His eyes flutter shut on a shaky exhalation.

Bill considers asking him if anything’s wrong, but the answer is pretty obvious; anyone would be shaken up by a scene like that, especially if they’d been expecting – or at least hoping for – a civil conversation. Or an empty apartment.

That’s why he comes over to sit on the floor beside Eddie instead, tired eyes watching Mike do the same so that their friend is sandwiched between them. No one mentions the fresh tears on Eddie’s cheeks, not even Richie.

“Did you wanna grab anything here before we head out?” Mike asks Eddie.

“O-or take a little rest?” Bill offers, glancing at Richie.

Eddie swallows, finally opening his eyes. His attention lands immediately on Richie crouched across from him, and there it stays. “A rest would be good. Since you’ll – you’re gonna be short one on the way back.”

“What?”

“You don’t w-wanna stay  _ here, _ do you?”

Richie’s eyes have gone wide, but his gaze has dropped from Eddie’s ashen face to his hands in his lap. Unlike Mike and Bill, he skips right over the questions and just reaches for Eddie’s left hand, the one he’s clutching to himself. 

Eddie doesn’t fight him, but his breath still catches in his throat at the same time as the three of theirs does.

“No,” Richie gasps, “no no no”—

“I’m sorry,” Eddie whispers, watching Richie watch a thin trickle of blood escape the bite wound on his wrist. “I – I had to. If I hadn’t”—

“No,” Richie pleads. “No, you’re gonna be fine, we’ll – I’ll”—He tries to bring the wound up to his own mouth, and that’s when Eddie finally jerks his hand free of Richie’s grip.

“Stop,” he half-sobs. “Rich, it’s too late.”

“No, it isn’t,” Mike says, visibly shaking himself out of a daze Bill still hasn’t quite woken up from. Bill frowns at him as he rises shakily to his feet and disappears into the hall. 

He comes back in a flurry of motion, his and Eddie’s backpacks clutched and swinging wildly from one hand.

Bill’s stomach drops when Mike tosses them both onto the bed and pulls the axe out from where he’d quietly tucked it away in his own backpack. From Eddie’s, he removes one of the last clean towels. 

“Eddie,” he says, sharp enough to shake Eddie’s startled gaze loose from the axe. “I need a windlass.”

“A what?” Richie says. He’s shifted to put himself between Mike and Eddie, one hand braced against Eddie’s knee, and he’s crying the hardest of the two by far.

“A – a windlass,” Mike repeats impatiently, almost panicked. “For”—

“For a tourniquet,” Bill realizes, rising to his own feet.

Eddie sucks in a sharp breath. “Mike, there’s no point”—

“There is!” Mike insists, rifling through both their bags, hands shaking. “Yes there is! Now,  _ please,  _ it just needs to be like – like a pen, but sturdy”—

“Tools,” Eddie says, blinking, yielding to Mike’s urgency. “Uh – under the sink. In the kitchen.”

“I’ll get one,” Bill promises. He nearly trips himself more than once trying to hurry. When he comes back, he finds Eddie stretched out on the floor with his feet propped up on Mike’s backpack. Richie’s got Eddie’s head in his lap and his uninjured hand clutched tightly in his. He’s running his other hand through Eddie’s hair, tearily murmuring a string of quiet platitudes and promises. 

Bill passes Mike the screwdriver he’d picked up, clinging to his just-in-case handful of other tools – a wrench that actually looks like a wrench, a long, thin hammer, and a pair of two other screwdrivers from the same set.

“Richie,” Eddie says, biting back a sharp whimper when Mike starts to tighten the towel he’s tied as far up Eddie’s left arm as it’ll go. The sleeve of his shirt dangles, torn, from his shoulder.

“Yeah, Eds?”

“Rich, I…  _ fuck,  _ Mike, that fucking  _ hurts”— _

“I’m sorry,” Mike says, wincing like it’s his own arm he’s tying up. 

“Mike, come on, ease up,” Richie says, pained. 

“I  _ can’t _ . It wouldn’t work. Eddie,” Mike says. “I’m – I – we have to cut it off.”

“The circulation?” Eddie whines. “Yeah, I think you got it. It’s not gonna”—

“H-he means your…” Bill’s gaze falls to the rest of Eddie’s arm. To the bite mark, a dark, angry red that stands out like an exclamation point against pale skin. 

Eddie blanches. “Wh–  _ no,  _ what the fuck, no!”

Richie’s hand goes still against the side of Eddie’s face. “Mikey,” he croaks. “Guys, you wouldn’t – you wouldn’t risk it if you didn’t think”—

“We have to try,” Mike says. “Eddie”—

But Eddie’s too busy struggling to wiggle away from Mike, who only turns away long enough to retrieve the axe from the bed behind them. The plastic cap from the store is still on it, the closest thing they could possibly get to a sterile instrument. Bill gives Richie a look, a  _ keep him still,  _ and gets up to dig Eddie’s bottle of rubbing alcohol out of his bag.

While Mike pours some of it over the blade, Richie manages to keep Eddie down, if not also calm.

“You can’t be fucking serious! Do you have any idea how unlikely that is to work? I’ll just bleed out,  _ Richie”— _

“Eds,” Richie cries. “Please.  _ Look  _ at me.  _ Please.  _ If anyone can – if anyone can do this, it has to be you. It has to be. Okay?”

Eddie’s gaze flickers between the axe in Mike’s still-shaking hands and the tears on Richie’s face. Richie’s hand is practically vibrating against Eddie’s cheek. Bill gets the distinct impression that every shuddering breath Eddie draws is the last and only thing keeping Richie from coming apart at the seams, and if  _ he _ gets it, Eddie must, too. 

He turns his face into Richie’s palm, away from his tourniqueted arm, and screws his eyes shut tight.

“I don’t – I don’t want to die,” he rasps. “I haven’t told you”—

“Tell me when we get back,” Richie says. “Tell me any-fucking-thing you want, Eddie, I promise I’ll listen. But not here.”

Eddie nods, eyes still closed. 

“Do it.”

Mike draws a sharp breath. “Here,” he says, pulling his belt free and slipping it past Eddie’s lips. “To bite on.”

Eddie’s only answer is a terrified whimper. He struggles to take a few deep breaths, then tries to say something around the strip of leather in his mouth that sounds like “on the count of,” but Mike doesn’t count.

Bill’s struck by an old memory, made morbid in this new context, of his friend chopping wood at his family farm, a chore Bill had come by to “help” him with more than once before the rest of the Losers were due to hang out.

He’s more careful now than he was then, tracking a slow downward path once to get the position right. Eddie doesn’t see that, so he doesn’t see the quick fall of the blade, and for a moment, Bill hopes wildly that he doesn’t feel it either, that the unforgivingly tight tourniquet sitting a few inches up was enough to numb the rest of his limb.

The sound he makes when the pain hits is one Bill doubts he’ll be able to forget anytime soon. 

It takes his and Richie’s combined efforts to keep Eddie from thrashing around hard enough to hurt himself. It takes a second cut to fully sever the last threads connecting Eddie’s arm to the rest of his body. The pristine carpet beneath quickly soaks up the blood that spills from the stump, and Bill wonders – should they have put a towel down? Should he get one now, apply pressure?

He also thinks, in some distant, coldly horrified corner of his mind, that nothing he’s ever written has captured what it’s actually like to see something like this happen, and he wonders if it was like this for Georgie, too, if it had bled more because he wasn’t there, Mike wasn’t there, he didn’t have the benefit of a makeshift tourniquet to stem the flow—

“Bill,” Mike chokes around tears as Eddie’s agonized cries break down into loud, painful sobs and voiceless whimpers. Richie looks like he’s seconds from losing the entire contents of his stomach, but Eddie’s still gripping his hand for dear life and Bill thinks it’d probably take a miracle to get Richie to take that small comfort from him for even the tiniest fraction of a second. 

“Bill, help, god, I can’t. The – the bleeding, we have to…”

It’s like Bill watches himself from a distance, straightening up and turning his back on the grisly scene. There’s only one clean rag left in Eddie’s bag; he doesn’t dare touch it until he’s found a pair of clean latex gloves stowed at the bottom of Eddie’s impressive stash of first aid supplies. 

He does his best to sound sure of himself when he returns to Eddie’s side. 

“I’m g-going to touch the – the w-wound,” he tells him. “It might h-hurt, s-so just bear with it.”

“You’re okay, Eds,” Richie rasps. “You’re doing really good. Gonna be fine. We’ll get you some crazy strong painkillers, okay? Won’t hurt at all, promise.”

Eddie doesn’t manage an actual response, just the slightest jerky nod of his head. He  _ does  _ manage another sharp cry when Bill actually touches what’s left of his arm. He can’t afford to be gentle, he knows that, but now he also knows more or less how Mike feels, seeing their friend gasping in literal agony because of him.

“Eddie,” Richie says, suddenly desperate. Eddie’s eyes flutter open for an instant before slamming shut again, maybe the closest thing he can manage to a response. “Hey, look at me. Please, stay with me. Eds.”

Bill stops watching to see if Eddie manages to follow Richie’s instructions. The white fabric of the towel quickly becomes a red sponge in his hand, soaked and hot to the touch. 

“Eds, hey, are you cold? Do you – Mike, can you – the comforter”—

They manage to get the duvet off the bed and onto Eddie, leaving only his face and severed arm exposed. He starts to turn to look at it, but Richie stops him with a gentle touch.

“Hey, don’t,” he says. “It’s not that bad, okay, just a”—

“Flesh wound,” Eddie slurs, and laughs at his own joke. Bill doesn’t know if he should be relieved or concerned by that. “Th-there’s um. Som’n in the cabinet.”

“What’s in the cabinet?” Mike asks. He gives Bill a questioning look –  _ the bleeding? _

Bill shakes his head. He doesn’t dare lighten up on the wound long enough to see if it’s slowed. At least the towel hasn’t reached the point yet where it’s soaked enough to drip more blood into the small pool at Bill’s knees. It’s still less blood than Bill might have expected there to be, and he trusts that Mikey knew what he was doing, sort of, but it could still be too much. Bill doesn’t know how much is too much.

“Painkillers?” Richie guesses when Eddie doesn’t respond right away.

“Y-yeah,” Eddie says. “Rich –  _ hurts.” _

“I know,” Richie tells him, still running his free hand through Eddie’s hair. The hand Eddie’s holding looks like its circulation has been cut off at least as effectively as if it had been tourniqueted, too, but Richie doesn’t react even slightly to the pain. “I know, Eds. We’ll get it for you, just as soon as the bleeding stops.”

Eddie whimpers again, sharp enough to cut, and Richie stops stroking his head to check his pulse.

“Fuck, I can’t – I don’t know how to find it,” he says.

“Lower,” Eddie says, and shudders. “Just – just don’t.”

“Don’t?” Richie repeats, adjusting his fingers accordingly. Bill doubts he knows what would qualify as a healthy pulse, either, but it must be obviously bad enough to warrant the look on Richie’s face.

“Stop,” Eddie says. A pause. His lips have lost some color, now, too. It doesn’t take a doctor to know that can’t be good. He needs a transfusion, an IV,  _ something,  _ but they don’t have any of that. Even if they did, Bill doubts they’d be able to use them correctly, without risking making Eddie worse.

“Stop what? Eds?” Richie moves his hand back to Eddie’s face, and Eddie gives him a weak facsimile of a smile.

“That.”

“Oh – sorry,” Richie says, immediately pulling his hand away.

“N-no,” Eddie protests, wincing when Bill chases his attempt to shift away from his touch. “Stay. Richie, god”—

“Gotcha, sorry,” Richie says again, hurriedly bringing his hand up to stroke at Eddie’s forehead, making slow, gentle passes through his badly mussed hair. His hand is shaking like crazy, but Eddie doesn’t seem to mind. 

“Should – should drink,” Eddie says, looking dazed. “I think,” and then he laughs again, a rattling sound that ends in a cough and another thready whine.

“I’ll get you something,” Mike says. “Bill, how’s it looking?”

“I don’t wanna know,” Eddie informs them. The flash of something like disgust on his face is reassuringly in-character.

Bill pulls the rag away and is surprised to find the bleeding has almost stopped.

Richie steals a glance at it and immediately has to turn away to stifle an ominous gag. The sound definitely tests Bill’s own self-control, but Eddie looks more than a little spooked as it is.

“Richie,” Eddie mumbles. “Richie?”

“It’s – it’s – it’s fine,” Richie tells him. “Best looking bloody stump I’ve ever seen – fuck, I’m sorry, let me try that again, jesus.”

Eddie tries to smile again, with only marginally more success. “Richie said I’m good looking kind of,” he says to Bill – which turns out to be a mistake, because his attempt to turn to look at Bill and Mike – Bill and the spot Mike had been standing in before he rushed off to the kitchen – brings his field of vision directly in line with his injury.

Bill thinks he’s about to actually pass out, which would probably be a mercy, all things considered, but instead he just seems to struggle for air, like his body can’t decide if it needs to breathe or scream. Richie gets him to look away, but calming him down again is another beast.

“I-I-It’ll heal,” Bill tries to tell him. “Eddie, it’s okay, it’ll”—

“But it’s”—

“It’s better than dying,” Richie says. “Okay, you’re alive, and you’re gonna fucking stay that way, so focus on that. Just breathe. Breathe.”

“Don’t say dying,” Eddie says. “You don’t – you don’t know.”

“Yes, I do,” Richie insists. “You’re gonna be back to nagging all of us about keeping that shitty RV shower clean in a week flat, and in two you’re gonna be helping me put spikes on the truck because I’m not gonna drop it ‘til you agree to, and you know it.”

Eddie closes his eyes for a moment and nods, his expression simultaneously taut and heavy with bone-deep exhaustion. “Promise, if – if I – you won’t leave me here,” he says. He’s starting to sound like he’s running uphill, forcing words out of a mouth that doesn’t want to move right. “Don’ wanna die here.”

Richie looks like he’s just been stabbed right through the heart, but he nods and even forces a smile so Eddie can see. “I promise you’re not gonna die here. I promise.”

“Hey, we’re in luck,” Mike says, returning with, of all things, an entire unopened bottle of fruit juice and a glass he must have taken from the cupboard. His voice is kind as he comes to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Bill, but there’s a quaver to it, an edge that threatens tears. “You guys keep a pretty stuffed pantry, huh?”

Eddie makes a soft noise of acknowledgment, and somehow between the three of them they manage to get some juice into him, followed by a whole bottle of water, spread out over what feels like an interminably long time.

The worst part of it is having to move Eddie. No matter how slowly and carefully they try to do it, he’s left gasping and flinching from the slightest agitation of the ruined muscles in his left shoulder and the remainder of his arm, gone several inches above the elbow. 

Every time he forgets and tries to move it, the pain punches the air from his lungs, leaving him choking and coughing and usually crying. Bill doesn’t know how he manages to stay conscious, and aside from the assurance it gives them that he’s still with them and probably,  _ hopefully,  _ not in blood loss-induced shock, he has no idea if that’s even a good thing. 

It’s on the heels of one particularly bad coughing fit that Eddie speaks again, woozy and not really any less pale than he’d been before. 

“Guys – gotta. Clean. ‘N bandaid – bandage.”

“We’ll have to touch it to do that,” Mike says, and before Eddie can speak to the wary look on his face, he adds,  _ “with gloves,  _ but can you handle it?”

“Oxy,” Eddie says shortly. “In – somewhere.” He frowns.

“Medicine cabinet, Eds?” Richie asks. 

He doesn’t get an answer this time, either, so Bill gets up to check out the cabinet in the bathroom. To get to it, he has to dodge blood and fluids he’d rather not think about, much less touch, but sure enough, he finds an old prescription bottle inside with several little white pills still left in it.

The label says it was filled for Myra, which comes as something of a relief. If they’re going to do everything right, then being careful with the pain meds has to be one of those things.

They give Eddie just half a pill to start. It makes him, if anything, less coherent, but as frankly terrifying as that is, it has to be worth making him even a little more comfortable.

The sinks still have running water, albeit not warm, so they all clean up as best they can even before they slip on some more of the gloves Eddie had packed. Richie tries to goad Eddie into poking fun at them for making the ordeal into a three-person job, but Eddie only gives him another of his weak smiles in response. 

That doesn’t dissuade Richie from talking Eddie through every step of the process, from using a pair of scissors to gently cut away his shirt to removing the tourniquet – a step not even Mike knows how to do exactly right, and that clearly hurts at least as bad as the cleaning and antiseptic. They finish dressing the wound as quickly as possible, the better to get him wrapped up in blankets as soon as they’re done.

He’s lost so much color by then that his sweat-soaked face blends right into the white of the sheets.

They find a guest room down the hall, though the only thing that really differentiates it from the other is the empty closet and still-pristine carpets.

Mike isn’t sure they should move him even that far, but Eddie takes one look at his ex-wife’s body still lying a scant few feet away from him and asks them to.

“Can you – can you give ‘r a. A blanket. S-something,” he adds when they manage to get him laid out on the bed, legs propped up and every inch of him covered in several layers of clean blankets.

“We’ll take care of her,” Mike promises him. “Just take it easy, okay?”

Bill follows Mike back into the hallway, leaving Richie to work on getting Eddie to eat and drink a little more. It’s all they have to substitute for an IV blood transfusion, which makes the whole endeavor seem pathetically inadequate.

“He’s still conscious,” Mike says, a little hollowly, as they gather up a sheet from the closet and spread it out over Myra. Neither of them says a word about Eddie’s arm, yet. They can’t exactly ask him about it.

“Do you kn-know when it’s safe for him to s-sleep?” Bill wonders.

Mike shakes his head. “But he has to rest sometime, right? How long do you think we can stay here?”

Bill chews on that for a moment. They have four more people to worry about, but there’s no way Eddie can make that trip again in this condition. 

“They’ll w-wait for us,” he says, needing the reassurance, himself. “B-but they’ll know s-something went…”

“You don’t think they’ll come?”

“H-here?” Bill can’t help but smile a little at the thought of it. It would be so classically Losers Club to agree on a safe meeting place and then abandon that plan for a rescue mission the second things went south; he’d probably be tempted to do it himself in their place. 

Thinking like that distracts him from the gnawing fear that they might not be the only ones who met with trouble today, so he says, “I’ll k-keep watch out the window tonight, in case they do.”

“And see how Eddie’s doing in the morning,” Mike follows.

_ See if he’s sick by morning,  _ they don’t dare say.

As if on cue, they hear a hoarse yelp from the other room, followed by a short burst of distressed apologies. Bill makes to go back in and check on them, but one look at Mike’s face roots him to the spot.

He’s staring at a section of carpet roughly halfway between Eddie’s arm and the abandoned axe, crusted over with blood, and he’s crying silently with his shoulders tensed like he got stuck flinching at the noise.

“Mikey,” Bill says, coming back to wrap his arms around him. “Hey, it’s okay, w-we’re doing all we can.”

“But I’m the one who – who did that to him,” Mike says, his voice wobbly. “And he could still…”

Bill is more than a little relieved that he doesn’t finish that sentence, or can’t. The threat is still too real and present to be said aloud so casually, like if they do it too much they really will lose him.

“W-we all could,” he tells him. “But for Eddie, if you hadn’t, it – it wouldn’t be a maybe.”

“I know,” Mike gasps. “God, I know, I just – I did that, like it – like it was nothing. What kind of person cuts their friend’s arm off with an axe – without even hesitating?”

“The kind wh-who’d do anything to protect other people,” Bill says, feeling a weight settle heavy in his chest, “even if it hurts you, too. Hell, even if it h-hurts him. If it saves his  _ life…” _

Mike finally returns the embrace, a wordless acceptance of the comfort Bill is offering him. And Bill isn’t done, because he could spend the rest of the night trying to explain to Mike how good he is, how desperately he wants him not to blame himself if the worst should happen, and the only reason he won’t is that they have work to do, a vigil to keep.

“The kind we w-were lucky to have in a crisis.”

“I hope so,” Mike sobs. “I really hope so.”

“We were,” Bill repeats insistently, “w-we  _ are.  _ And w-we can’t start letting this be about whose f-fault any of it is, b-because it’s not. It’s not anyone’s. So – so promise you won’t, no matter what.”

Mike tries to keep his response to a short nod, but Bill isn’t having it.

_ “Promise.” _

_ “Okay,”  _ Mike says, his volume spiking enough that Richie and Eddie might even be able to hear him from down the hall. “Okay, I promise to try. But I’m – I’m going to believe he’ll make it through. And then…”

“And then h-he will,” Bill finishes for him, because if there’s anything Mike’s taught him, it’s not to underestimate the importance of belief – or the strength the seven, now eight of them have when they’re all together. 

It’s just the four of them for now, though. One doing his best to fight his way back while the other three pull up chairs or pace or sit oh-so-carefully beside him, the way Richie does, never not touching but always gentle – feeling his pulse, holding his hand, helping him drink or eat or ride out the worst of the pain in whatever small ways he can.

By morning, the only one of them who’s slept at all is Eddie, and only in short bursts bookended by pain that repeatedly outstrips what little they can safely give him from a single bottle of prescription painkillers.

He doesn’t get better, but he doesn’t get worse, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a warning - this chapter contains an amputation scene and its aftermath and is overall intended to be angst-heavy.
> 
> And a disclaimer, it also contains extremely dubious (or... outright incorrect) representations of emergency medical treatment. Be nice to me, I majored in Spanish and gender studies!
> 
> Depending on how writing the next chapter goes, I may wind up bumping the chapter count from ten to eleven, but we'll see! Either way, we are quite close to done.


	10. By the Skin of Your Teeth and the Breadth of a Hair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So so sorry for the massive delay in posting! Obviously I didn't make my end-of-February goal, and while I was visiting California I got very little writing done. Now I'm stuck in self-quarantine at home with what may or may not actually be COVID-19, which is obviously not ideal, BUT does mean I can write a lot! 
> 
> As you might have noticed, I bumped the chapter count to eleven; chapter eleven is almost completely finished (and sitting at 10 or 11 thousand words) and will be going up either tomorrow or the next day, after I've put some finishing touches on it. Thank you for reading!

“What if we miss them on their way back?” Stanley asks, fidgeting with his binoculars until the thud of a body walking directly into the side of the RV nearly startles him into dropping them. Patty reaches over and gently lifts the long strap over his head. She lets her hand linger when she’s through, tickling the short strands at the nape of his neck, and it’s as if some of the tension coiled in his belly seeps out through that little hole in his defenses.

“Then we’ll all still wind up here,” Beverly says, her tone the vocal equivalent of balling hands into fists, or digging heels into soft ground. “And it doesn’t have to be ‘we,’ anyway. Ben’s hurt, and we can’t leave him here alone. I can manage by myself if I’m not on foot.”

Patty’s fingers slow to a stop against Stanley’s skin, and he watches her gaze flit to Ben, who drops the ice pack he’d had pressed to his side in his struggle to sit upright. For two nights now, they’ve been keeping them in constant rotation, in and out of the mini-kitchen’s freezer.

“No, I can… I’ll be okay, really. Don’t want you out”—his breath stutters over a movement made slightly too quickly, a gasp he forcibly bites off—”all alone.”

Stanley sighs, hoping it’ll release some of that old, obnoxious pressure building in his chest, worming its way up his throat, but it doesn’t.

The little half-empty cardboard box of spare bullets in the backpack Beverly’s been packing clinks as she drops the bag to the ground and kneels beside Ben, easing him back onto the covers somehow more carefully than he’d gotten himself up off of them. The pressure becomes an ache.

“Ben’s right,” Patty says, “it’s better if I”—

“No,” Stan says, hushed, “no, I’ll go. It should be me. It has to be – right?”

“Stanley,” Patty murmurs. Her hands close around his, a silent plea, and all he can do is lean in to kiss her. She chases him when he tries to pull away, stealing every fraction of a second she can.

“It’s just a drive, right?” he says, mostly to convince himself. “But if anything happens, I’m the next best until Bev teaches you how to shoot.”

Patty sighs, too, a soft, reluctant puff of air against Stanley’s cheek.

Ben gives them both a pained look that probably has very little to do with his shallow breathing. “I’m sorry, guys.”

“It’s okay, Ben, we’ll be back,” Beverly tells him. She vacillates between starting toward the door and returning to his side, pacing like a caged lion until finally she comes back to give him a parting kiss. Ben makes a weak attempt to hold her there, but she slips her hand free of his grip with tears in her eyes.

“With those other assholes,” Stanley adds, then with a tense smile, “And Mike.”

Patty laughs, standing with him to join Beverly by the door. She picks up extra water, enough for both of them, and he tucks it into the bag Beverly has slung over her shoulder. 

“They’re probably fine,” Patty tells them. “So both of you also be safe.”

“Back soon, Pats,” Stanley says, quelling his nervousness one last time with a short embrace and a kiss. He leaves it feeling a little more settled.

“Bev,” Ben says, shifting to give her a soft smile. “…Your hair is beautiful. I meant to tell you.”

Beverly answers with a teary smile of her own. “I was thinking you could help me even it out, when we get back.”

Ben’s smile widens and finally reaches his eyes. “Promise.”

They make it to the car dodging the slow-moving  _ things  _ and their clawing, bloodied hands, which is how Stan belatedly realizes he forgot to actually pick up anything to use as a weapon. Beverly starts the car without a hitch, settling Stan’s fear that they’d make it this far only to get trapped in an unmoving car surrounded by – by these dead-or-maybe-not people. 

Patty waves to them from one of the windows of the RV, her expression hard to read through two layers of dirty glass. Before Beverly manages to maneuver the car just right to pull away without hitting anything, Ben hobbles up to stand beside her. 

They all wave at each other from the relative safety of their vehicles. The whole scene feels so out-of-place it’s almost funny, like they’re exchanging goodbyes in someone’s driveway before a day trip out hiking, rather than clinging desperately to the last glimpse they can get of each other in a city overrun with flesh-eating corpses.

They dodge a lot of those all along the circuitous path they take to reach the address Eddie gave them. They also get lost once or twice, despite Beverly’s greater familiarity with the city; Stanley isn’t any help on that front. She and Eddie are the only ones who wound up in New York, and Stan’s visits have all been for business, few and far between and usually very brief. There’s no helping it.

“Here?” 

Stanley stops scanning the road ahead of them for relatively passable stretches of pavement. It’s a good thing he actually knows how to use his binoculars, unlike Richie, who even at forty takes literal minutes to focus and refocus the things, only to lose track of what he’d been looking at. Stan always thought he was just fucking with him when they were kids, but now he’s not so sure. But then again – Richie does get pretty attached to jokes no one but him finds funny. 

Beverly is looking at a building with long scorch marks running up one side of it. The front windows have been broken in – in, not out, because most of the glass appears to be strewn across the floor inside – which wouldn’t stand out much around here if it weren’t for the particularly dense concentration of creatures wandering through its lobby. 

(Stan is still more than a little reluctant to use the word “zombie,” and why shouldn’t he be? He doesn’t know how the others all adapted to that particular fact so readily.)

Regardless, it seems safe to assume that the damage was done recently; nothing else has been loud enough yet to draw the creatures elsewhere.

That’s good, if it means their friends made it  _ in,  _ and it’s not as if they’d be able to tell whether they made it out.

Except that mob might have complicated things. 

“What floor did Eddie say he was on?” Stan asks. He feels kind of guilty for scanning the crowd again, looking for familiar faces and terrified of actually seeing any. 

“Pretty high,” Beverly says, still scanning the dark windows facing streetside. “We should have asked for the number.”

“…We aren’t going in there,” Stanley says, alarmed. “Bev.”

Beverly chews on her lip and taps thoughtfully at the steering wheel. Stanley is tempted to reach over and turn the engine off, half because some of the things walking past are starting to take notice of its low rumble, and half because the gas is starting to run lower than a quarter-tank.

Beverly notices the unhasty approach of a few of the might-be-zombies and gets that vaguely concerning Idea Look she and Bill are so infamous for. 

“Yeah, that would be stupid,” she says with a little smile. “So what if we…”

“What.”

“Well, we could make some noise up the street. We’ll get  _ everyone’s  _ attention that way.” She nods pointedly at the shambling figures making a mess of Eddie’s apartment building. “If we’re lucky, one of them will come to a window up there. We’d know they’re there. Or we give them a way out if they’re stuck halfway.”

“And if no one’s stuck but us?!”

“We’ll be able to get out,” Beverly says. “One way or another.” Stanley doubts very much if he could talk her out of this anyway, and even he can admit that compared to the whole series of stunts they pulled in that grocery store, this is practically nothing.

Beverly lets him climb into the backseat of the car, where he’ll have the best possible view out the driver-side window, and then she drives them just far enough up the street that Stan can still use the binoculars to watch.

“Ready?”

“No.”

Beverly takes the go-ahead for what it is, and although Stan was kidding, he actually is more startled than he’d expected to be by the sound of a car horn in New York City. In the silent streets, it’s almost deafening, so of course it has the intended effect. 

While Beverly keeps an eye on the incoming wave of zombies, Stanley looks for signs of life in every window that isn’t obscured by blinds or curtains.

“Anything?”

Stanley’s heart sinks after several beats, impressive given that it’s also hammering in time with the quiet rumble of an approaching storm. “No.”

But then—”Yes – yes, someone’s – they’re really way up there.”

Beverly turns her own gaze skyward. “Who is that?”

“Bill,” Stanley says. There’s just enough glare off the outside of the window that he can’t make out his expression until he lifts the window up and leans out, presumably to get a better look at the idiots making a scene on the street below.

He sees a hand make a grab at Bill’s unprotected back and almost cries out, at least until he sees that it’s Mike joining him – and probably also trying to make sure he doesn’t suffer a particularly bad fall.

Stanley waits for Richie and Eddie to join them to no avail.

Mike disappears from the window after a moment, too. Bill waves down at them, but it’s a far cry from a warm farewell. His movements are wide and sloppy, a desperate attempt to capture and hold their attention.

“Honk again,” Stanley says, “just once, so they’ll know we see them.”

Bill pauses, then holds up one finger on both hands, as emphatically as if he were flipping them off.

“He wants us to wait a minute,” Stan translates, not sure how much Beverly can see unaided.

The first scrape of hands along the sides of their car makes him lower the binoculars in a hurry, and he has an adrenaline-fueled idea of his own.

“Bev,” he says, “see that car up there? The silver one.”

“We don’t need to switch,” Beverly tries to reassure him. “At least not right here.”

“No,” Stanley says, and he almost wishes Richie were already down here just to hear him say, “We shouldn’t have to hit it that hard to activate its alarm.”

He knows his friend would’ve picked up on the implication of personal experience, which is a shame for him, because Stan’s not likely to fess up to it under normal circumstances, regardless of his own petty certainty that Richie still sucks at parallel parking at least as much as he does.

Beverly gawks open-mouthed at him in the rearview mirror. “Wow. But good idea.”

They hit the horn a few more times on their way to the neatly-parked Prius. It’s probably too far down the street for their friends to see what they’re up to, but the crunch of a T-bone accident and subsequent screech of an anti-theft car alarm speaks for itself, and it works; their stolen car can’t compete with that kind of noise for the attention of a pack of brainless corpses.

Stanley returns his attention to the window in time to see Mike return with something clutched in his hands. Something doesn’t sit right about the fact that Richie and Eddie still haven’t joined the two of them there, even with all this commotion.

Mike unfolds the object, which turns out to be a sheet, and then dangles it out the window so that the two of them can read the words scrawled across it.

_ ‘Losers? Once no twice yes.’ _

The message is written large enough that Stanley doesn’t have to tell Beverly to gently honk twice. Hopefully, that’s the last response they’ll want from them. The way out is a lot clearer now; Stan suspects they’ll need to keep it that way.

As he watches, Bill turns briefly to the interior of the room they’re in. At this angle, Stanley can’t see much of it beyond the shade of a floor lamp and a bit of ceiling, but it inspires a little hope in him anyway.

That hope dissipates all at once when Bill and Mike get their makeshift sign turned around and Stanley reads the words,  _ ‘Coming down – Eddie hurt bad.’ _

“I can’t read that one,” Beverly says. “…Stan?”

“It – it says Eddie’s hurt,” Stanley says, his mouth suddenly cotton-dry. That explains Richie not being there, unless there’s worse news waiting for them when their friends make it down here.

Is it too much to hope that the elevators run on backup power?

“Do they need help?” Beverly says. Her grip on the steering wheel has gone slack, but she continues to crane her neck upward, like if she tries hard enough to see, their other two friends will just materialize beside Bill and Mike.

They wait another minute or two, giving Stan and Bev time to read the sign, glancing behind themselves occasionally like they’re engaging in tense conversation with the other two members of their party. Then they slowly withdraw the sheet.

“They’re coming down,” Stanley says belatedly. “I don’t know.”

He and Bev sit in tense silence until the window closes without another sign or signal from Mike and Bill. It’s as much of an answer as they’re likely to get without the means to communicate any questions of their own.

All they can do is sit with them, just like back in the RV. They try to offer each other quiet reassurances the longer they wait – maybe Eddie got hit in the head trying to keep the same thing from happening to Richie again. Maybe he has a sprain slowing him down. A lot of things could count as “bad” when you’re trapped in a building with a bunch of flesh-eating monsters.

Stan is the first one to catch a glimpse of movement toward the back of the building’s interior, where the shadows are deepest. He reaches up to grab at Beverly’s shoulder, his head throbbing with the force of his fear.

Bill appears from behind a blood-smeared door as it swings open; Stan can see it glistening, catching fragments of light from outside. A thunderous crack erupts from the driver’s seat, and he looks in time to see Beverly already taking aim at a second lurching body only a short distance farther away from their friends. Bill sways to a stop when the first one crumples to the floor, but his hesitation is short-lived. He holds the door wide open for Mike and Richie to follow, both of them hunched under whatever they’re carrying on their backs.

Stanley’s stomach twists forebodingly.

“Get the door,” Beverly snaps, shaking Stan back into action. He lunges forward across the seats, throwing open the one closest to him before reaching up to unlatch the front passenger door. 

Bill makes it to them first, dropping his bloodied bat to the floor of the car like it weighs a thousand pounds. Instead of climbing in, he turns back to Mike and Richie, who are still lagging a few feet behind, and it’s only then, in the absence of multiple pressing threats to focus on, that Stanley realizes what –  _ who –  _ Mike is carrying on his shoulders.

The first and only thing he can discern apart from a mass of thick blankets is a pale face twisted into an agonized grimace. Stanley can’t even tell if Eddie is conscious, much less what’s wrong with him.

He gets out of the car to help, but Mike shakes his head and nods at Richie, who’s lugging three of their backpacks and an over-the-shoulder mini duffle bag Stan is pretty sure they didn’t have before. He looks almost as bad as Mike, both of them shaking so hard it seems like they could collapse onto the pavement at any moment.

They get the trunk open despite the breathless incoherence of most of their group, and Stanley doesn’t have the time to explain his relief at finding it empty; he couldn’t take a repeat of the man in red’s car right now. He can hardly stand to be out in the open, even with Bev and Bill watching their backs.

As soon as he’s got most of their things tossed haphazardly into the back, Richie slams the door shut and comes around to help Mike lower Eddie to the backseat. Stanley tries to help, but Richie promptly bats his hand away with a hoarse, “Don’t – don’t touch him there.”

Stan doesn’t figure that one out until Richie’s first attempt to pull Eddie backward into the car elicits a sharp gasp from Eddie. 

If he hadn’t been awake before, that drags him back to the surface.

It also dislodges the blanket that had been wrapped nearly up to his neck, revealing thick bandages running from his shoulder down across what little Stan can see of his bare chest.

His own breath stutters in his throat when his brain finally stops superimposing what he expects to see over what isn’t actually there.

“What the fuck happened to his”—

“Not now, Stan, please,” Richie croaks. He sounds like he’s managed to talk himself hoarse. That, or he’s sick. He certainly  _ looks _ sick. Almost as sick as Eddie, whose arm now ends less than halfway to his elbow.

Eddie gasps again when Bill slips in beside Richie, jostling both of them despite the care he tries to take. It’s increasingly obvious from the sluggish way they’re all moving that they’re exhausted. Probably made that unexpected push down all those stairs running on the last fumes of an adrenaline rush.

Mike takes the front seat with a final reluctant look at Eddie clutched gingerly in Richie’s arms, and Stan tries to be relieved that Eddie still has two legs that he has to carefully lift so he can sit, too. He doesn’t even know where to look – at Eddie barely holding it together, or at the gradually approaching figures he proceeds to slam the door on.

They don’t have to tell Bev twice; the second Stan nods at her in the rearview mirror, she speeds off in the direction they came from – at least until they roll over a bump and Eddie lets out a strangled cry. He nearly kicks Stan square in the stomach scrambling against the hands that struggle to keep him still.

Scrambling to get away from the pain, maybe.

“Bev, we’ve g-got to take it slow,” Bill says. “Eddie, he’s…”

Bev nods and slows to a crawl, still sneaking nervous, confused glances at them through the rearview mirror. That helps, but the streets of a city this big wouldn’t be clear of obstacles on a good day, let alone in the wake of a violent epidemic. It’s as if the air around them freezes and flows in the same jagged pattern as Eddie breathes, fighting pain for air every time their ride accidentally moves any part of him that’s too close to his severed limb.

Stan can’t be the only one who feels guilty for taking those first minutes to let his own breath slow and even out. Richie hardly does, he’s holding so stock-still with Eddie folding in against him.

Eventually, Beverly takes a shuddering breath, herself, and stops the car to turn in her seat.

When her eyes settle on the stump of Eddie’s arm, she doesn’t make a single noise. She starts to reach for him, over the back of the seat, and only stops herself when Eddie’s eyes flutter open.

They don’t focus on anything, except maybe the pattern on Richie’s shirt. He’s about eye-level with it, his remaining hand fisted in the fabric with a strength Stan is surprised he still has. 

“Eddie,” Beverly says, crying along with Richie now. Mike is hunched over in the front seat, not looking at anyone until Bill reaches up to rub at his shoulder, and Stanley remembers the axe he’d packed, a backup weapon in case things went wrong. 

“‘S happ’ning?” Eddie rasps when Beverly doesn’t actually ask the same question Stan did, never mind that they can all feel it hanging over them. Richie is eyeing her hand like a warning, like he’d bite it off if it came any closer – but that might be a little too accurate, Stan thinks.

“We’re headed back, Eds,” Richie tells him, and Stan can’t believe he manages to sound that calm with tears making his already-puffy eyes impossibly redder than they were. Stan doesn’t even trust himself to speak, let alone evenly enough to reassure Eddie. “We’re gonna get you into bed, find you some more pain meds, maybe hook you up with one of Mike’s books…”

Eddie blinks and takes a reassuringly steady breath. 

“‘Kay,” he says. His voice sounds all splintered, dry and creaky like old wood.

“Can we make the drive easier on you?” Beverly asks him.

Eddie tries to laugh but only manages a cough that seems to tense every muscle in his body. Stanley doesn’t know what to do, so he rubs gently at his friend’s pajama-clad leg. They’d been in his apartment, after all – everyone else is still wearing the varyingly disgusting clothes they left in, but Eddie’s are clean, and his bandages look fresh. 

“Doubt it,” Eddie finally manages. “I’ll ‘s… try not to. Pass out.”

The way he says it, it doesn’t sound like he’d been planning to end his sentence that mildly.

Mike has to audibly swallow the urge to cry, but of course Eddie doesn’t notice. He spends the rest of the drive in much the same way he started it, particularly when they have to pass through the most battered parts of their route. Beverly tries to take them around the worst of it via side-streets and sidewalks, but they only have so much fuel, and the last thing they can risk is having to carry Eddie the rest of the way to the camper.

They find it just the way they left it, right down to the visibly broken door, still as close to properly shut as they could get it.

Bill and Mike zero in on that immediately.

Stan defers to Beverly, who stares resolutely out the windshield instead of looking at them. She leaves as little space as possible between the car and the door they’ll be making a beeline for. “We had company. Everyone on our end is okay, though,” she hurries to add with an uncertain glance back at Eddie.

“For a given definition of okay,” Stan murmurs, finally catching sight of Patty looking for them from the window. Ben must still be lying down.

Eddie shifts almost imperceptibly in Richie’s arms. He forces his eyes open a moment later. “‘S that mean?”

“What  _ does  _ that mean?” Richie repeats. He follows Eddie’s gaze to Stan with a look of sudden alarm, inadvertently throwing Stanley too far off guard to formulate an actual response. It’s hard to tell how lucid Eddie is, but it’s the first time since they made it out of that building that he’s really  _ looked  _ at much of anyone, even Richie.

“Well, no one got their arm taken off,” Stan says, and then immediately regrets it. Mike makes a low, pained noise up front. Eddie, fortunately or not, takes too long processing the comment to look anything but confused. 

“Jesus, Stanley,” Richie says.

“B-Bev?” Bill prompts.

Beverly shakes her head but elaborates anyway, going from drumming her fingers along the steering wheel to picking at a loose piece of rubber on it. “Ben has a broken rib, or… maybe just fractured. It hurts but he’s not… he’s okay.”

Eddie grunts, letting his eyes fall shut and his head fall back against the hand Richie obligingly moves to support him. Stanley can’t parse whether the sound is meant to express displeasure, acknowledgment, or just nonspecific pain.

Pain, probably. His expression hasn’t relaxed once yet, as far as Stan can tell; if it weren’t for the  _ why,  _ Stan is sure Richie would be ribbing him about it.

_ You know if you’re not careful, your face’ll get stuck like that, Eds. _

And if Eddie were in any condition to, he’d probably protest Richie’s insistence on being the one to carry him from the car to the RV. Mike volunteers to make a beeline for the cab of the truck, and Bill agrees – “This is n-no place for Eddie to recover,” he says, but Beverly vetoes both of them in unison with Stanley.

“You guys are dead on your feet,” Stanley argues. “You’ll wrap us around a lamp post in five minutes. No. I’ll drive.”

“Go slow,” Richie says. Stanley doubts he gives half a fuck  _ who _ drives, or whether anyone does at all. His other hand is tucked up against Eddie’s chest, somewhere between the comforter and his bandages, right where it’s been for upward of twenty minutes now. “And stop as soon as we’re clear, okay?”

Stan is tempted to tell him he sounds like Eddie, but he also has a sneaking suspicion it’d make him start crying again, so he doesn’t. He doesn’t need to be told to stop soon, anyway; he knows Eddie can’t take much more shaking up, and it doesn’t feel right to be apart from everyone at a time like this, way up there where he won’t know what’s happening.

He wants to kiss Patty hello, doesn’t want to leave her to see what’s happened without being there, too, but he has no real choice. When they finally get moving again, he sees an opportunity to run a relatively clear path up to the front of the vehicle. He has to take it.

But as he drives, he still finds himself constantly stealing glances through the back windshield, into the narrow camper window through which he can only see Richie’s empty, unmade bed and a section of insulated ceiling. When he’s not trying desperately to keep the RV running slow and steady against the pull of its own weight, he strains to catch even the faintest hint of his friends’ voices over the relentless grind of the engine.

-*-

“Would he be… worse?”

Patty frowns somewhat distantly, her eyes still fixed on the half-open doors to the room she’d been sharing with Stan. From where he’s sitting, Ben can see Beverly in profile, her arms outstretched as if to adjust sheets or tuck in a blanket. He can also see the tips of Eddie’s fingers as he makes spasmodic fists of the bedding; every time it happens, Richie breaks out his best impression of a bedside nurse, or maybe a concerned mother – like his own, or like Ben’s, but probably not like Eddie’s.

“Worse than what?” Patty says, inadvertently distracting Ben from the thought that he’d really like to be as good at exuding comforting reassurance as Richie is. 

“Would he be sick,” Ben says, finally unable to keep looking in Eddie’s direction, “by now, if it – if it didn’t work?”

“Oh,” Patty says, whisper-soft. “I think so. Is he…?”

Mike startles both of them by answering. Ben had sort of hoped he wouldn’t hear.

“He didn’t have a fever earlier today.” He looks at Patty, his expression strained and almost pleading. “You think that means he’s okay?”

If he doesn’t get a different kind of infection in the meantime, and if the strain on his body isn’t too much. Ben still can’t bring himself to turn his attention back to the sound of ragged breathing and rattling pills – the remainder of a stranger’s unused antibiotics, thank god for Eddie’s own foresight – so he keeps watching Mike, instead.

“I never saw anyone else go this long without showing symptoms,” Patty says, and Mike’s shoulders slump ever so slightly, even if he doesn’t quite release his held breath. “And even if he did get a little sick, it could be a lot of things.”

_ Yeah, amputation by axe tends to put some strain on the immune system,  _ Ben can imagine Richie saying. 

“You okay, Mike?” Ben asks. They’ve already been through that question, the unspoken  _ but no one else got bitten, right? We don’t have to spend days wondering about anyone else, too?  _ But this isn’t that kind of question, now, because Mike flinches harder than any of them whenever Eddie’s voice carries wordless protests and sharp, pained noises up to the rest of them. He’d told them himself that he was the one who had to do it, but he hadn’t said it like that – “had to.” He said it like he was confessing to something, like he expected them to pass judgment on him.

Ben doesn’t know how to thank him, or if he can, or should. Not yet, maybe, but as soon as Eddie is back to his usual self.

Mike shakes his head and has to swallow several times to get an answer out. “Just waiting,” he says, “to apologize to him. For… for not using some of that time in Derry to read up on surgery.”

Patty laughs first, the kind of soft, guilty laughter reserved for wakes and waiting rooms. Ben is impressed she can recognize the joke before he can – though, really, it’s only  _ because  _ she does that he stops trying to parse his friend’s response. Mike doesn’t even smile, really, though he tries. 

“Well, seven of us put together should be able to muddle through without a medical degree, right?” Ben replies, trying for levity and failing miserably. But it’s something, the attempt. They’ve all gotten too accustomed to having Richie for that.

“Eight, when Eddie’s had some time to rest,” Patty says, not a joke. He’s no expert either, but they can be sure he’ll have some opinions, and the more of those, the better.

No one is surprised that Richie stays with Eddie even after Bill and Beverly re-emerge from the bedroom, now more of a recovery room, a makeshift hospital room. Stan drives them as far from the city as he can get them without stopping for gas; they have a spare canister or two in the back of the truck, Ben is pretty sure, but the shade they find in a well-forested area just off the road makes it as good a place as any to stop. Safe, or safe enough.

Stan comes in complaining about how undrivable their vehicle is, a brief tirade punctuated with a breathless, “How is he?”

“Sleeping, I hope,” Beverly says. She’s spent the past however-long plucking absent-mindedly at a longer tuft of hair, her gaze fixed but not focused on the patch of floor Ben had his embarrassingly one-sided scuffle with Tom on; he tries to distract her with gentle touches and earns a soft smile for his efforts. “Richie’s with him.”

“You drove very well,” Patty tells Stan, already wrapping him up in a hug so he can bury his face in her neck.

“It was a pretty s-smooth ride,” Bill agrees. “And it helps to have a b-bed.”

Stan gives him and Mike a pointed look over Patty’s shoulder. “Speaking of which.”

Bill raises his hands in defeat despite having one arm looped around Mike’s waist. Mike is slumped against him, half-awake, but he perks up to insist that he’s fine where he is.

“Richie’s gonna give us a hard enough time without you two also refusing to get any sleep,” Stan insists.

“We’ll make sure he does, too,” Beverly adds with a fleeting look at the closed doors. There hasn’t been a peep from behind them for a while now, which is probably a good sign, albeit also a nerve-wracking one in its own way. If it were a real hospital room, they’d all be in there with Richie, but as it stands, there isn’t enough space for a quarter as many chairs as they’d need, and crowding an injured man seems like a risk worth avoiding.

“You guys did the hardest part,” Ben agrees. “We can take it from here.”

“Someone needs to help change his bandages,” Mike says. Sluggishly, he lets Bill pull him to his feet. “And make sure he stays hydrated, and if you can get him to eat – well, I guess you guys know.”

“Richie went over it, t-too, Mikey,” Bill confirms. “Let’s go l-lie down. Just for a nap.”

Mike nods. “Okay. Okay, just a nap.”

Bill doesn’t exactly give them the full conspiratorial wink-and-a-nod, but Ben figures no one has any intention of waking them until they’ve slept at least a full night’s worth.

The shadows cast by the trees outside have completely swallowed their camper and are busy taking bites of the bright orange patches left on the grass when Beverly slips in to check on Richie and Eddie. Ben can’t make out anything they say over the static sound of wind shaking leaves and Stan and Patty’s quiet exchange opposite where he sits half-paying attention to the messy building plans he’s been sketching out, just for something to keep his mind off the pain in his side and the weight in his chest.

But Bev and Richie must talk at least a little, anyway, because the sun dips far below the tree line before she returns to Ben’s side, puffy-eyed and carrying a bundle of used gauze in gloved hands.

Stan and Patty fall silent as soon as the door clicks shut behind her; it makes it seem loud, like a mallet coming down on a chisel.

The bandages are clean, mostly; Ben gives them and Beverly a searching look, afraid to ask, and maybe also a little afraid to know.

“There’s some drainage,” Beverly says delicately, “but nothing that looks really bad. And no fever.”

“Is he okay?” Patty asks.

“Did he say anything?” Stan adds.

“He’s… tired. We were trying not to wake him in the first place, but it’s”—she gestures with the bandages as she loads them gingerly into a trash bag from under the kitchen sink—“kind of a lot of manhandling. I think he wanted to, but – no, he didn’t say anything. He knew I was there…”

She bites her lip and shrugs. There’s a smile there, tucked into her teeth and sparkling in her eyes. There’s just enough room for it alongside the lingering tears; Ben is tempted to slip into the recovery room just to personally thank Richie, or maybe Eddie, for putting it there.

“Ben?” Beverly lingers by the counter, her hand trailing along the edge of it. If he could stand in a single smooth motion without suffering any pain for it, he’d already be at her side, just for the sweet ache of having the soft, uneven waves of her hair in easy reach. Just to be near.

“Earth to Ben,” Stan says, his mouth lifting at one corner. He’s shoulder-to-shoulder with Patty, and lowers his head to rest it on hers when Ben looks at him.

He’s a little smug about it.

Beverly chuckles, Ben’s face warms, and the heavy silence muffling everything they’ve said up to now lifts just enough to let a sliver of light through. 

And speaking of lights, it’s the first time they’ve used the ones on the side of the RV. They don’t have chairs or picnic tables to really complete the scene, but Beverly still helps Ben roll out the canopy, anyway. 

“Eddie’s gonna love this,” she announces, stepping back to inspect their handiwork.

“Can’t get a sunburn if the sun doesn’t touch you,” Ben agrees, doing his best not to look too winded. Beverly’s smile becomes a little more indulgent when she notices. She settles down cross-legged on the grass with so little hesitation that Ben is surprised to find it damp when he joins her. 

“No,” she laughs, “behind me.”

“Uh,” Ben says, already shifting very carefully. She stops him with a gentle hand on his knee and repositions herself, instead, plopping down in front of him and then reaching behind herself to hand him a pair of scissors.

When he hesitates to take them, she glances back with a knowing smile and says, “It’s okay, we have more than one pair of scissors. The ones we’re using for Eddie are in the first aid kit.”

“And everyone’s been sterilizing them?” Ben frets, knowing the answer has to be yes. Everyone knows that; there are a few ways to almost guarantee yourself an infection, and dirty hands and tools are one of them.

“Yes, but I don’t think Eddie would appreciate it if we used them for haircuts in between,” Beverly says. Her grip on the scissors has loosened enough that they’re drooping in her hand; she has that artificially blank expression she always wears when she’s nervous but doesn’t want anyone to comment on it.

Ben takes the scissors from her gently. “Still sure you want that Ben Hanscom haircut? I can’t guarantee the quality.”

“Technically it’ll be a designer haircut,” Beverly reassures him.

“Because I design buildings?” Ben guesses, unable to stifle a snort. It’s worth the pain it sends lancing through his side, because it gets another smile out of Beverly that reaches all the way to her eyes.

“Remember,” she says, “I just have to like it. And I already kind of like it, believe it or not. Just looking for an excuse. If you want to, obviously.”

“I promised,” Ben says, chest aglow. “I mean – I want to.”

He still hesitates before running his fingers through her hair. He was right – it’s soft, especially the fresh-cut ends. He’d meant to make a sort of game of it, make his own stab at an impression, but she shivers under his touch, and he panics a little.

“Is that okay? Should I not”—

Beverly laughs, breathless. “Yes, that’s okay. Just – just don’t pull, and I’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” Ben says seriously. “So – so, requests?”

Beverly leans into his touch. “Mm, if you just even it out. So it looks a little less like a toddler cut it.”

“You may have come to the wrong guy,” Ben jokes, his breath stuttering over the contact. 

“No, I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right guy this time,” she teases.

Ben smiles, knowing she won’t see it but hoping she’ll hear it in his voice when he talks to himself –  _ let’s see, okay, maybe if I… _

He decides that since the longest strands are mostly on top, he might be able to get away with getting a little artistic with it, cutting the sides to match the shortest parts and going for a graded… he’s not sure what to call it, exactly, but if it doesn’t work he can always cut everything to match, a totally passable plan B. 

“Oh – wait,” Ben says, pausing with the scissors half-raised to a particularly unruly bit on the left. “Should we grab a towel or something?”

“Nah,” Beverly says, “we don’t have a lot to spare. Besides, I think it’s about time for a shower.”

She pauses, then tilts her head back at him again, her expression playful. “Maybe you could help me wash off the loose strands when we’re done here?”

Ben feels his face go hot. “Oh –  _ oh _ , uh, if – sure. Yeah. Anything, Beverly.”

Beverly steals a quick kiss before settling back into her earlier position, only a little closer than she’d been before. Of course nothing will  _ happen,  _ Ben’s sure of that, and for a lot of reasons, not least of which is their friend recuperating a very short distance from the bathroom stall.

That’s not easy to forget, but out here still feels almost like another world. Ben fills it with the crisp snap of the scissors, each one spaced far apart, as careful and slow as it needs to be to ensure he doesn’t hurt his “client.”

He doesn’t have a comb, either, so he uses his fingers to tease apart the pieces he needs to cut. At one point, Beverly exhales long and slow, like she does when she takes a long drag of a cigarette. It makes Ben’s own lungs ache just a little less for a full breath of air. 

“I’m almost done,” he lies.

“That’s too bad,” Beverly purrs, leaning back into the hand Ben had started to withdraw.

“Oh,” he realizes with another smile. “Are you gonna fall asleep on me?”

“I might.”

“Because I can go slower.”

“Then you’ll have to carry me inside,” she warns. She sounds a little more awake when she adds, “Actually, just wake me up.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t try it,” Ben admits, obligingly getting back to work with a quiet request for her to tilt her head back a little. “But maybe next time?”

“Ohh,” Beverly murmurs. It’s a little hard to tell if that’s part of her reply, or just a reaction to Ben’s careful touches. “Already trying to schedule a second appointment?”

“We take walk-ins,” Ben offers.

“Is there a referral discount?” Bev asks.  _ Snip. _

“Have someone in mind?” 

“Yeah, a whole truckload of people,” she says, moving so suddenly that Ben only barely manages to get the scissors out of the way in time. He’s so caught up in her energy, he slips in a different sense.

“Eddie could probably use – ah. Jesus, I’m sorry”—

Bev tries to laugh, but it comes out forced. “Well. Yeah, maybe.”

They get quiet again after that. Ben watches Beverly pick at blades of grass collecting dew beside her, almost keeping time with the last few passes Ben makes with the scissors. 

He’s about ready to declare his work here complete when she speaks up again.

“Did you ever think the zombies were like,” Bev says, and then, “Never mind.”

“Like the leper?” Ben guesses. “It… occurred to me. But I don’t”—

“Think they’re Eddie’s fault, god, no,” Beverly finishes. She sighs, too. “Besides, I think they know us better than that, just like Pennywise.”

“The… kids?” Ben says, wincing over his own word choice.

Bev snorts softly. “Yeah. It’s just – Tom. And Eddie’s wife. Do you think they knew we’d come back?”

“I don’t know,” Ben murmurs. He fidgets with the scissors, tucks them into the front pocket of his shirt. The truth is he’s had a hard time dismissing the same thought – that just as surely as Pennywise’s offspring wanted to make sure Tom found Beverly, they wanted Eddie to find Myra.

But he doubts they counted on Eddie’s reason for coming to look for her being what it was. Pennywise never wanted any of them to see how capable they are – of being brave, of being loved, of doing the right thing – hell, probably never quite grasped that they were, or that that was something It could never take away.

So, like parent, like offspring. 

“You two still won,” Ben says. “They did their worst, and you won.”

Beverly turns to smile at him. The overhead lights catch on the tears in her eyes, making them glitter. Ben smiles, too, and doesn’t speak again through the lump in his throat, throbbing in time with the sharp pain from his ribs.

They head in dew-damp and grass-stained, leaving behind the vague impressions of two kneeling bodies and scattered strands of soft red hair.


	11. Trouble Shared is Trouble Halved

“She would’ve wanted me to end up like her.”

Richie startles awake so abruptly he feels like he’s falling, like his feet have been swept out from under him by a strong tide. His neck and back protest his sudden attempt to straighten up and get his bearings; he tries to rub at his face and is again impeded by the fact that his glasses are still perched on the edge of his nose.

He blinks in the gray half-light filtering through the blinds opposite him, his pulse a dull roar in his ears, and is surprised to find Eddie’s big brown eyes open and focused on him when he’s finally able to bring himself to glance down.

“Eds,” he breathes, a belated, hoarse response to words he’d assumed he dreamt. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but he also hadn’t expected Eddie to be awake so early; lately he always sleeps for long stretches of time, mostly only interrupted by his friends trying to do what they can to keep him clean and fed.

Eddie’s expression is hard to read, but Richie can’t help but feel encouraged by the way he looks Richie over, picking apart his rumpled clothes and uncombed hair – changed and washed only very reluctantly, and after a lot of convincing from Stan and Bev.

He doesn’t really expect Eddie to say anything else. Usually, when he’s lucid enough to say anything that makes sense, he’s too tired to do much more than let them know he needs help via reluctant statements and one-word admissions.  _ Hungry. Need to piss.  _ Richie doesn’t blame him in the slightest for not  _ wanting  _ to talk through that; Eddie’s starting to get the hang of a few things, recovering some of his energy, slowly but surely, but Richie still has to help him through a lot. Most days, it feels like all he can really do for his friend is make it all as quick and painless as possible.

“Myra,” Eddie continues, apparently unbothered by the insubstantiality of Richie’s response, or the way he startles again at the sound of Eddie’s voice. “She would’ve wanted me to get bitten. Not even by her, just – by someone.”

“I hear the zombie divorce rate is pretty low,” Richie says around a yawn.

Eddie snorts, either at the joke or at the way Richie tries to cover his owlish surprise, and Richie’s heart lifts even higher than it had the first morning Eddie managed to get up from bed without help.

He’d just looked so  _ relieved— _

“That’s – yeah,” Eddie says. “And speaking of zombies, you fucking look like one. When was the last time you slept?”

Richie shrugs. Here and there, when he can’t keep his eyes open anymore. Eddie still doesn’t look much better than Richie feels, but even Richie isn’t enough of an asshole to point out that particular hypocrisy.

“Just now,” he says. It’s not completely a lie, if power naps count.

Eddie sighs. “Richie.”

_ Did you forget you’re still getting over a concussion, asshole? _

_ Eddie Spaghetti,  _ the part of him that’s basking in the glow of an actual conversation leaps to reply. Richie swallows it along with the urge to cry, but he can’t do anything about the way his face heats up, except be grateful that between the two of them, he’s the only one who’s spent enough time lately staring at the other’s face to recognize a little extra color without needing to turn a light on.

“Rich,” Eddie says, quieter. He finally drops his gaze from Richie’s face, searching out his shaking hands on the covers and taking one in his.

Richie opens his mouth fully expecting a dumb joke to come spilling out, but all he gets to break the silence is a jagged hiccup.

Eddie flinches. “Dude, if you throw up here I  _ will  _ bite you.”

Richie laughs, but it comes out wet and shaky. “Sounds about right, you fuckin’ chihuahua.”

“Won’t be laughing when we have to cut off  _ your _ arm,” Eddie grouses.

To be fair, he probably doesn’t expect Richie’s only response to be a sudden deluge of tears.

“Richie?” He can just hear the way Eddie grits his teeth through sitting up so he can reach more than just Richie’s hands. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Eddie’s hand on his shoulder might as well weigh as much as the entire RV and truck combined; Richie crumples against him, and while he can’t hold back his tears, he can at least hold back enough of his weight to avoid hurting him.

“Sorry,” he whispers.

“‘S okay,” Eddie tells him. He doesn’t even complain when Richie buries his face in his shoulder, opposite his bandaged wound, or when he doesn’t say anything else for so long that when he does finally lift his head, the room has gone from gray to white and Eddie’s hand has drifted to rest halfway down his back, probably picking up every tremor that runs through him.

It’s still there when someone knocks gently at the door.

“Richie? Is everything okay?”

“Bev,” Richie breathes. He starts to pull away, but Eddie makes a soft noise and a fist of Richie’s already very rumpled shirt.

“We’re okay,” Eddie calls. “Richie just found out Santa isn’t real.”

Richie sniffles and lets himself smile into Eddie’s shoulder. “Eddie’s trying to convince me Santa isn’t real.”

A beat passes before Beverly chuckles on the other side of the door. She already sounds farther away when she says, “Okay, just give us a shout if you two need anything.”

“Ice cream,” Richie calls after her. He doesn’t even hear her laugh again, but he does hear Eddie, and that’s just as good. It makes it a little easier to sit back so they can see each other’s faces again.

Richie’s is a mess, probably, and Eddie’s is pinched in concern; he raises an eyebrow at him and finally withdraws his hand to the sheets bundled around his lap.

Richie’s face is still hot, but now it’s also guilt that makes his throat tight enough to strain his next words.

“Woulda thought I’d be done with that shit by now.”

Eddie shrugs more with one side than the other and still winces. Richie doesn’t know whether to take that as a sign that the (very light) stretches they’ve been trying out are working or not. It’s probably too early to tell.

“Just don’t act surprised if I start too,” Eddie warns. He glances down at his hand in his lap, then, and his eyes actually do narrow ominously, moving like they’re tracing the contours of invisible fingers intertwined with his five.

For fuck’s sake. Richie would give him his in a second if he could.

“I’ll be expecting it when I tell you about the Easter bunny,” he jokes instead, and because he still can’t fully swallow the guilt, he adds, “But, uh, you’re okay? I mean – sort of okay? On a scale from one to ten”—

“Six,” Eddie interrupts. He pauses, his eyes finally turned up, away from the empty space at his side. “Seven.” He looks at Richie. “Even though – no, ah,  _ because  _ I keep waking up to you – to your ugly mug. Except for all the times you’ve woken me up on purpose, dick.”

Richie stares, and thinks,  _ shit _ . Just when he’d managed to get his trash mouth working again.

Eddie breaks eye contact again, fidgets, straightens and bends his legs, works all his muscles and occasionally has to stifle little noises, and Richie just… stares, until Eddie finally snaps.

“Jeez, did you just draw the short straw, or what?”

It’s not even particularly venomous, as exhausted as he’s starting to look again. Richie wonders what woke him up in the first place.

“No, no, we didn’t – uh, I’m happy to be here?” Richie tries to throw in a smile, but he’s pretty sure it looks more like a grimace. It feels like one.

“Sure,” Eddie says after another pause, sinking back onto the pillows with a long sigh through his nose. “People don’t usually cry when they’re happy.”

“Well, I do,” Richie defends, “I’m happy you’re okay and”— _ fuck,  _ of course he’d start doing it again, as if he really needed to illustrate his point—“and I – I…” 

Need you? Love you? Should he backtrack, tell Eddie something he already knows?  _ We would all be really fucking sad if you died, Eddie. What are friends for? _

Eddie’s smile is warm and only slightly less blurry than it would be if Richie weren’t wearing his glasses. He pats the blankets beside him. “Get over here, Rich.”

Richie does. His careful attempts to keep his hands to himself wind up feeling pretty stupid when Eddie opts to drape his arm halfway across Richie’s chest. It takes some wiggling to ensure that the remainder of his other arm can lie flat on the pillow he’s been using to prop it up, but he still finds a comfortable way to turn slightly toward Richie.

“And take your fucking glasses off, if those break you’ll be about as useful as me,” Eddie adds, his voice already dropping an octave into the same drowsy mumble Richie’s been hearing for days.

Richie resists the urge to move away so that Eddie won’t be able to feel his heart hammering in his chest. “Stop that. You’re not – you’re still – you’re like fucking Rambo, Eds, you could take any of us in a fight one-handed any day.”

Eddie rolls his eyes at him. “Yeah, all I need are my teeth. Take them off.”

“Fine,” Richie mutters, reaching up to set his glasses down beside Eddie’s pill bottles, water bottles and first-aid supplies. “But I’m not sleeping until you agree with me.”

The Eddie-shaped blur in front of him sighs. “I agree that I could beat you in unarmed combat, now will you shut up and stop trying to exhaust yourself to death?”

“Nooo,” Richie drawls. He tries to poke the tip of Eddie’s nose and gets his cheek instead. “You’re like the only one here who knows how to do anything to a car that isn’t paying someone to put air in the tires”—

“I’m pretty sure you’re the only one here who doesn’t know how to do more than that,” Eddie interrupts. Richie studiously ignores him.

—” _ And  _ if all the maps in the world spontaneously combusted you’d still be able to get us wherever we decide to go next like it was nothing. Like a salmon. You’re in bizarrely good shape for a forty-year-old and you fight like a feral cat.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything to that, so Richie goes on, more quietly as Eddie’s eyes drift shut and open only very slowly.

“And you’re my best fucking friend, so even if you couldn’t do fucking anything, who cares?”

“I care,” Eddie murmurs.

“Great, then you’ll help with the Mad Max spikes,” Richie decides. “Promise and I’ll think about taking a nap. Ten minutes for every spike. Going once…”

“Is that all you think about?” Eddie complains.

“Going twice…”

“Fine,” Eddie huffs, “I’ll help you make this RV look worse than it already does. I think I promised that already, anyway, right?”

“And?”

“And – and thanks. For always doing this.”

Richie frowns. Not the answer he expected. “Annoying you into submission?”

“…Yeah,” Eddie says quietly. “You’re really fucking good at it.”

“Gotta earn my keep somehow,” Richie says.

Falling asleep turns out to be really easy with Eddie breathing in his ear, and waking up to Eddie’s legs tangled up in his is worth at least a nine out of ten on its own.

It’d be ten out of ten if Richie could separate his own desperate hopes from whatever Eddie’s actual intentions are. All he knows is that when Stan accidentally wakes them up bringing in two plates of food and extra supplies for changing Eddie’s bandages, Eddie spends a lot longer than he has to watching Richie try to blink away the worst of the grogginess. And it’s almost enough to make Richie believe what he said about waking up to Richie’s mug – untamed cowlicks, pillow indents and all.

-*-

Mike doesn’t see very much of Eddie those first couple of weeks. It’s easier to assume he’s not welcome in the cramped little room all the others frequent, and no amount of cajoling from Bill or anyone else is enough to make him venture in; instead, he makes do with everyone’s updates and Eddie’s infrequent appearances rounding the corner on his way to the bathroom, more often than not eclipsed by Richie and the arm he slings around his waist.

The first time he  _ really  _ gets to see Eddie, Eddie’s making his slow way past the kitchen, wobbling just enough to explain how Richie hovers casually near him, ready to spot him if he loses his balance. 

He spots Mike just as Mike is hurriedly stuffing his bookmark back into the pages of the novel he’d been reading, ready to bolt as soon as Eddie sees him and stiffens or flinches or—

Instead, Eddie greets him with a smile and a quiet, “Hey.”

Mike tries and fails to keep his eyes off of the empty sleeve dangling from his left shoulder.

“H-hey,” he says, setting the book down only to pick it up again a moment later. “Uh…”

Eddie’s smile falters a little. He doesn’t come to sit beside Mike so much as he starts to lose his balance and has to use the cushions in front of him to break his fall. It takes him a moment to catch his breath, and Mike – against his better judgment – reaches a hand out to steady him.

Eddie bristles; Mike withdraws before Eddie’s even finished telling him he’s fine.

Outside, Bill is playing catch with the others, staining his blue jeans green and dropping the ball more than he actually catches it; with one door propped open, Mike can hear a chorus of  _ awww _ ’s and Patty’s amused “Oh no!” as easily as if they had come from indoors.

Richie plops onto the narrow couch opposite Eddie and Mike and grins at whatever happens to prompt another round of cheers. “Mike, your man is getting his ass handed to him out there.”

“Yeah,” Mike admits, “but he’s having fun with it.”

He steals a glance over his shoulder, catches a glimpse of Beverly darting past and Bill laughing as Ben gets ready to throw the ball to her. And Eddie, head propped against the glass, face still turned to Richie with a grateful little smile.

“Mike,” he says, “I was actually wondering…”

“Yeah?” Mike asks, immediately nervous. He wishes he’d had more time to brace himself for this, but that’s hardly fair; after all, it’s Eddie who has a good reason to worry about having to face Mike, not the other way around, and he has Richie, who pretends to be engrossed in the other Losers’ antics while keeping as unobtrusive an ear as Richie is capable of on their conversation.

The thought puts Mike at ease enough that he doesn’t forget to actually respond to Eddie, albeit only with a prompting nod.

“…Did you have anything for me to read? Richie’s a lot less entertaining after the first dozen times he tries out standup material on you.”

“Captive audiences are the best,” Richie preens, dropping the pretense of disinterest the second he hears his name. “And you fucking love it, you laugh every time.”

“Must be the pain meds,” Eddie retorts, although Mike happens to know he’s been taking less and less of those for some time, and none at all in the past few days.

“Yeah,” Mike responds, lurching to his feet and bustling over to the cupboard he remembers stowing Eddie’s portion of their library in. “Uh, did you – was there anything in particular you were looking for?”

“Horror,” Richie replies with a shit-eating grin.

“Fuck you,” Eddie says, pointing at him for emphasis before he returns his attention to Mike. “And no more comedy, either, please, I’m up to my fucking ears in it.”

“And nothing could possibly be funnier than your personal entertainer,” Richie adds.

“Yeah, exactly,” Eddie says matter-of-factly. He and Mike finally share a genuinely amused grin at how quickly his easy agreement brings Richie up short. Mike would feel bad for it if Richie weren’t also grinning open-mouthed like it’s the best thing he’s heard all day.

It’s almost unfair that Eddie doesn’t know why it’s so easy for him to get the better of their friend.

Mike winds up pulling no less than four books off the shelf, which is still less than half of what he  _ could _ have brought over to Eddie. He’s more nervous about the implications of handing him so many than he is about whether Eddie will like his recommendations, but Eddie just beams at the assortment of adventure, sci-fi, and one pulpy romance – which is, admittedly, a reach, but if he doesn’t enjoy the story as much as Mike not-so-guiltily did, he’ll at least get a laugh out of it. Win-win, kind of.

“These actually look good,” Eddie marvels. “You really know your stuff.”

Mike ducks into the palm of his hand. “I’ve just had the time to read a lot.”

“No, really – thank you,” Eddie insists, but he’s not looking at the books spread across his lap anymore. “Is – uh, is that how you knew…?” He gestures vaguely at his empty sleeve. It’s not a chopping motion, but Mike gets the message.

“T-tourniquets come up in a lot of books,” Mike says carefully, eyes averted, “but it’s… just something good to know if you work on a farm, so I’ve sort of known how forever. I’d never actually done it before. Or – or any of that.”

Eddie smiles like,  _ Of course you hadn’t _ . “Well – look, you’ve probably already heard it from everyone else, but  _ I _ haven’t gotten the chance to thank you, so – thanks for cutting my fucking arm off, and making sure I didn’t, y’know, bleed out.”

Mike’s face goes hot, then cold. “I – I had to. I was kind of expecting you to…”

He shrugs, or starts to; Eddie’s hand catches him on the upward motion, and he jumps. He turns to see Eddie frowning at him, or just frowning. The stump of his other arm moves under the loose fabric of his sleeve, and he sighs shortly before letting go of Mike’s shoulder to gesture emphatically instead. 

“What, you thought I’d be scared of you or something?” 

“Or just… uncomfortable,” Mike says with a second shrug that’s _ definitely  _ uncomfortable.

“Dude,” Eddie says.

“Mike, buddy, we love you, but if we ever need someone to play scarecrow with some fucking clown-spider things, you’re the ultimate last resort choice. Even  _ with  _ an axe.”

Eddie nods at Richie. “Right – I guess. But the point is,” he presses, hand finally making a chopping motion, the same sort of one he’s always done, but with no second palm to hit for full effect, “you saved my fucking life. You did that. Richie and Bill helped, but”—

“I couldn’t have done it,” Richie mutters, his smile dropping so fast it’s a bit disorienting. “I was gonna suck the zombie-spit out, and then you’d’ve had to amputate my head, too.”

“Ugh,” Eddie mutters. “Richie, that’s”—

“He  _ was _ going to, though, wasn’t he?” Mike recalls.

“I don’t remember that!”

_ That’s not surprising,  _ Mike thinks. He’d have a hard time remembering details, too, if he’d been through what Eddie has.

“But you believe it,” Richie says, his smile returning more muted. “And Bill was on another fucking planet, so, yeah, we’re really lucky we had you, Mikey.”

Eddie runs his hand through his hair and sighs.

“So… don’t freak out if you catch me having a hard time with this shit, okay?” he adds. “I’d rather have to deal with losing one arm than not get to fucking be here with you guys. So – okay?”

Mike, of course, gets so choked up that all he can actually do is nod his acknowledgment. He can’t  _ begin  _ to tell them just how relieved he is that he was there, that Eddie’s  _ here _ , that they’re not upset with him, but that might be okay; Richie responds to Eddie wrapping his arm around Mike by throwing both of his around both of them, and no one says a word about Mike’s tears or the way Richie stumbles over his exaggeratedly mushy “Aww, I love you guys.”

Eddie laughs and throws a flippant “sap” right back at him, but when they break up their impromptu huddle, he’s still smiling wide.

-*-

The problem is, it’s really fucking easy for Eddie to keep coming up with excuses to procrastinate the second half of his talk with Richie, post-losing his entire left arm.

He doesn’t even  _ need  _ excuses when the pain is at its worst, those first few days and after, when he spends an ungodly amount of time asleep with Richie sat beside him, always within easy arm’s reach and always keeping a close eye on him. Eddie probably dreams at least a few of the times he only half-registers the gentle press of Richie’s fingers at his pulse points, or easing a thermometer past his lips.

Especially the one time he thinks he feels the pad of a thumb trace his lips corner-to-corner, a single touch that ripples through Eddie’s floaty consciousness long after the thermometer disappears from under his tongue. 

He keeps waiting after that because he has to be sure he won’t get an infection and die right on the heels of a confession – which, in a really macabre way, is kind of nice to think about, because it gives him an in to imagining Richie actually reciprocating.

The only reason he doesn’t say something that morning Richie wakes him up whimpering in the throes of a nightmare is the realization, far too late in coming, that Richie looks absolutely terrible, himself, and Eddie has to devote his scant energy to making sure he’ll live to hear what Eddie has to say, too. 

From then on, it’s pretty much just because he has a bad habit, and  _ they  _ have a routine, for lack of a better word, that Eddie doesn’t want to risk losing even after he works up to talking to Mike, letting him and everyone else see him without the barrier of blankets and Richie’s steadfast presence to help him feel less exposed.

Even when it’s not actively hurting, his missing arm is like a scratchy sweater he never stops noticing. 

He can’t put into words how grateful he is to everyone for not reminding him to give it time, like he doesn’t already know it could take god-knows how long for him to feel totally normal again.

That’s at least part of the reason he makes good on his threat to break down crying, one night when he has to ask Richie for help getting dressed for bed. He’s overextended himself and he knows it, but he doesn’t  _ really  _ feel it until he spends at least ten minutes perched on the edge of his big, empty bed, trying and utterly failing to turn a long-sleeved shirt right-side-out with one hand.

Richie cuts his chat with Stan short to slip into the room the instant Eddie calls for him, and he doesn’t even make Eddie explain what he needs when he shoves the offending garment into Richie’s open hands. He just does it, and he doesn’t try to help Eddie put it on afterward, because he knows Eddie can do that just fine on his own. Knows he’ll want to.

Eddie doesn’t even realize he’s started crying until Richie pulls him into a hug with his stupid shirt still dangling like a scarf from his neck.

Richie doesn’t say a word the entire time Eddie sits there grabbing at him and sobbing so loudly that everyone must be able to hear it, and when he’s done, he phrases his offer to stay with Eddie the rest of the night like it’s a request –  _ would you mind, Eds? _

And Eddie says, “Please,” and the little room goes back to being as much Richie’s as it is his after a break of only a couple of too-lonely nights.

It’s Eddie’s idea to finally get a move on, although he doesn’t fail to notice how Bill’s shoulders relax when he brings it up over some of their last cans of food and dwindling collection of boxed noodles. Eddie hates to think they might have been stretching their supplies for his sake, but that’s not the main reason he suggests that they start looking for more (and a safer place to weather the steadily-approaching winter).

He just hopes the transition from one place to another will shake something loose in him, and it does, the way that taking tangible action has always made him feel more resolute, capable,  _ braver than you think. _

That’s how he winds up interrupting Richie mid-conversation with Mike the next afternoon, the RV rumbling and lurching as Patty steers them back onto the road, their fuel tank full and a couple more back-up canisters loaded safely into the truck bed.

It’s harder than Eddie expected, compensating for the occasional dip and bump of the RV in motion, but he’s getting the hang of keeping his balance. Sink or swim, basically; being in a crowded, enclosed space comes as both a blessing and a curse – plenty to grab hold of, plenty to bang into.

“Why?” Mike wonders as Eddie comes into easy earshot over the roar of the vehicle around them. It seems so much louder after so long without it.

“Because! It might make it too awkward for him to say whatever he was going to – hey, Eds,” Richie cuts himself off with a jolt when he notices Eddie making his unsteady way over. If Eddie didn’t know better, he’d assume Richie  _ wanted  _ him to think something was up, falling into a forced-casual pose with his elbow braced on the table, his chin in his hand and his lips stretched into a comically forced smile.

He waves at Eddie with his other hand. Mike rolls his eyes good-naturedly and slides out of the booth, stretching his legs as he goes with a relieved sigh. Eddie is tempted to remind him that he should be keeping himself moving as much as possible even when they’re cooped up in here, but he’s too struck by the feeling of having interrupted something secret to get his mouth moving.

“Come to borrow Richie?” Mike asks him, and doesn’t wait for an answer before adding, “Oh, and I’ve been meaning to ask, how are the books working out?”

Eddie tears his wandering gaze off of Richie, who meets it with an expression like a dog caught red-handed with the morning paper in its teeth.

“I’m not even done with the second one yet,” he admits, “but it’s really good.”

Mike smiles. “Which one is that?”

_ “The Left Hand of Darkness,”  _ Richie answers with a more genuine grin. “Ever since he started reading it,  _ I’m _ the one asking  _ him  _ to go the fuck to bed.”

“Bullshit, because the second I turn the flashlight off you try to start a conversation!” Eddie snaps. His whole face feels too hot, which is ridiculous, obviously, because all Richie  _ did  _ was reference their shared sleeping situation in a casual conversation with one of their friends. All of whom already know and don’t care that they’re sharing a bed, despite the fact that they don’t, strictly speaking,  _ need _ to, because even Eddie isn’t afraid he’ll suddenly kick it at this point.

The irony isn’t lost on him – that it’s only now, at a juncture where it would be entirely reasonable to fear medical emergencies, that he’s largely unconcerned about them.

Mike’s smile widens enough to crinkle the corners of his eyes. He looks at Richie until Richie makes reluctant eye contact with him, his expression a perfect translation of “don’t start.”

Start what, though?

Mike makes them one last cheerful promise to keep an eye out for more books by the same author, then leaves to gently pry Bill’s attention away from the notebook he’s been hunched over since well before they stopped for gas.

That’s still likely to be an easier task than getting Beverly to put her embroidery down for anyone but Ben. She let Eddie see it when he asked, of course, but the entire time she was explaining her choice of colors, she never once stopped working the needle through the flannel.

Richie smiles up at Eddie from his seat at the table, gestures at the spot Mike just abandoned and the deck of cards Eddie had barely noticed was sitting between them. “Wanna play go fish?”

“Sure,” Eddie sighs. “But not – not here, okay?”

“Uh,” Richie says, “do you wanna climb out onto the roof, then? Might be a little windy.”

Eddie steels himself, rolls his eyes and says, “I need to talk to you,” but that still only gets him a blank look, so he lowers his voice even more and adds, “In private.”

Richie blinks, his cheeks going a little pink. “Oh. Okay, sure, I mean. Now?”

“If that’s okay with you,” Eddie hedges, already drifting back toward their room. “But you did promise to listen, so – sooner rather than later, alright? Please?”

Richie laughs shortly, rubbing at the back of his neck as he gets to his feet. “Well, now you’ve got me curious.”

Eddie declines to respond; instead, he takes Richie by the hand and practically drags him back into their room. He’s sure Richie notices how clammy his hand is, but at least he doesn’t also have to use him like a cane to keep himself upright when they take a curve in the road fast enough to throw him off a little, and Richie doesn’t breathe a word about it despite his look of concern.

Eddie only lets go to close the door behind them before promptly sinking onto the bed beside Richie. 

Now that he’s here, he has no idea what to do with Richie’s undivided attention.

Richie doesn’t wait long to kick his shoes off and collapse backward onto the sheets Eddie spent an inordinate amount of time neatly folding this morning. Eddie doesn’t even have it in himself to get annoyed; he does it half just for the practice, anyway. 

Still, he stays where he is, back ramrod straight, fingers plucking at his empty sleeve. He can feel Richie watching him, but he still jumps a little when Richie finally decides to speak.

“Does it feel like a weight off your chest?”

Eddie stares at him, then at his missing arm. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

It’s almost funny how fast Richie’s eyes go wide. “Sorry,” he says quickly, which doesn’t really answer the question.

“…Is it weird that it is?” Eddie says. He makes himself relax enough to lift one leg halfway onto the bed, the better to turn so he can see how Richie looks at him. 

“Well, you probably lost like, what? Ten pounds? So… I guess not?” 

Eddie laughs, not sure himself if he does so because of the joke itself or because Richie looks like he wants to crawl under the bed after saying it.

“Asshole.”

“Yeah,” Richie agrees. “I can’t turn it off.”

It’d probably help if Eddie got to the point. He wishes he had something other than his fucking shirt sleeve to fidget with, like the deck of cards he’s just now realizing they forgot to take with them, or Richie’s hand, or even a piece of jewelry.

He decides to lead with that, if only to get himself talking again.

“Lost my ring, too,” he murmurs. The bed creaks as Richie shifts to prop himself up on one arm, but he doesn’t say anything, just nods to show Eddie he’s still listening. Eddie takes a slow, deep breath, the way his therapist taught him to in college, during the short-lived period he bothered going to see one. He feels it fill his belly and lets it go just as gradually. “I was gonna make a big gesture of taking it off, you know? Or at least enjoy it.

He smiles dryly at Richie, whose own smile is peeking through a frown like the sun through clouds. “I did  _ not  _ enjoy it.”

Richie sits up and finally lets his smile grow into one of those charming, ear-to-ear grins Eddie loves so much. “You were gonna make a big show of taking your wedding ring off in  _ front  _ of your wife? That’s brutal even for you.”

Ah. Moment of truth. Eddie looks away, then shakes his head and looks at Richie again. 

“No,” he says, “I was going to take it off in front of you.”

Richie, bless his heart, just looks confused. Eddie pulls himself the rest of the way onto the bed, heart hammering so hard in his chest that he can feel it throbbing where the stump of his arm meets empty air. Richie’s breath catches, but he doesn’t respond, so Eddie just keeps talking.

“Or not, you know, maybe I would’ve just thrown it at a fucking zombie or left it behind somewhere. I guess it doesn’t matter now, anyway, right? I really missed my chance.”

He laughs, high and breathless, completely at a loss for what to do about the way Richie swallows and blinks like he’s trying not to cry.

“You’d make a terrible stripper if you think it’s sexy to start with a  _ ring,” _ he tells Eddie, his voice tellingly wobbly. “But I gotta hand it to you, you’re definitely a fucking tease anyway.”

Eddie snorts, his cheeks going hot again. His chest flutters, and the fact that it’s hope instead of outright fear this time doesn’t actually calm him down at all. “Okay, asshole, fine, I’m trying to say I have it bad for you, but if you’re too busy making sex jokes”—

“Me, too,” Richie says, his hand closing around Eddie’s so fast it’s like there’s a pair of magnets drawing them to each other. “I’ve – since we were kids. I had it so bad I thought I’d die.” He laughs, and Eddie dares himself to raise both their hands so he can feel the tears rolling down Richie’s cheeks, just to convince himself they’re really there. Richie laughs again, and his eyes flutter closed. “Jesus, Eds, even if it  _ is  _ because it’s slim pickin’s around here, are you sure?”

“Wha – that’s not – Richie, that’s fucked up,” Eddie hisses. His quiet indignation is enough to override his nerves – probably not a good thing, given that his attempt to tackle Richie back onto the comforter completely unbalances him, knocking both their foreheads together before he can right himself. It’s not that hard of a hit, but Eddie still rears back in alarm. “Fuck, I’m sorry, are you okay?”

But Richie just laughs, genuine, from-the-belly amused while he rubs absently at his forehead. “Is that your way of telling me you  _ are  _ sure, or should I go?”

“Of fucking course I’m sure, Rich, this isn’t some ‘last man on earth’ bullshit. Maybe it would’ve taken me longer if all this shit hadn’t happened, but I swear to god I would have still – I would’ve come around.”

Richie takes Eddie’s shoulders in his hands, gently, like he expects Eddie to flinch away at any moment, and of course Eddie does nothing of the sort. He’s too busy taking in Richie’s expression, cracked wide open and so full of teary-eyed joy it takes Eddie’s breath away. 

“Can I kiss you?”

“You better.”

Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised that Richie is a terrible kisser. He isn’t surprised at all that that doesn’t matter, because he’s also warm and eager and he helps support Eddie so he can do more with his hand than brace himself against the mattress.

Richie needs a shave less terribly than Eddie does, naturally, but Eddie likes how his beard scrapes at his nose and cheeks. Even after they’ve pulled away for air, he keeps running his hand over Richie’s stubble, through his hair, along his lips, and Richie parts them ever so slightly so that Eddie can feel his breath tickle his knuckles.

Eddie takes that as an invitation to steal several more quick kisses. He slides his tongue across Richie’s lower lip on the last one, and Richie surprises him by returning the gesture with a soft noise that seems to vibrate in Eddie’s own chest, too. 

When Richie gives him a long, searching look the next time Eddie drags himself away to breathe, all Eddie can think to say is, “I think you might be a natural.”

It’s very hard not to stare at Richie’s slightly reddened lips when he smiles again, so Eddie doesn’t try.

“And I think you’re bullshitting me, but you know what? I’ll take it.”

“Good,” Eddie decides, finally rolling off of Richie to lie beside him instead. It’s way too early for a nap, but he’s considering one anyway, if he can get Richie to stick around for it. Shouldn’t be hard to do.

“Hey, Eds?”

“Yeah?”

“You still owe me a game of go fish,” Richie says. “Don’t forget.”

“Aren’t  _ you  _ forgetting something?”

Richie pauses. “I guess I must be.”

“The spikes? For the truck? If I win I’m just going to watch you try to attach them yourself. Technically I’ll still be keeping my promise if all I do is explain how you’re supposed to do it. And then laugh at you.”

Richie snort-laughs. “That’s fine, since you’re not gonna win.”

“Like it’s hard to beat you at literally any card game,” Eddie scoffs, turning his head to fix Richie with an unimpressed look that clearly doesn’t faze him in the slightest.

“Fine, then if I win, you also get to help me spray paint it. We’ll take a vote on what colors.”

“If I can veto red, deal. Oh,  _ and _ on the condition that we get respirators for the fumes.”

“Only nerds wear masks to spray paint shit,” Richie complains, putting up a token resistance until Eddie kisses him on the cheek.

“I’m asking nicely,” he says. “Because I don’t want anyone getting lung cancer from lead paint.”

“That’d be a waste,” Richie says weakly. “After – after everything.”

“Yeah, so no complaints,” Eddie says, kissing him again. Richie shivers against him.

“Who’s complaining?” he retorts, except his voice breaks a little on the tail-end. 

“Rich?”

“I’m – I’m okay,” Richie huffs. “C’mon, can’t a guy cry a little about getting a love confession from his best friend? Who happens to also be the coolest, toughest guy I’ve ever known, fucking… saved my life multiple times?”

“And I’d do it again,” Eddie says, and he means it. He couldn’t regret putting himself between Myra and his friends if he tried. “But hopefully I won’t have to, because we’re all going to stay out of trouble.”

“Eddie,” Richie laughs, still crying a little, “Eds. When have we ever stayed out of trouble?”

“Fuck,” Eddie mutters, “you’re right. Maybe I should hitch a ride on someone else’s camping trailer and spare myself the trouble.”

“If you’re lucky, they’ll even let you have some of the mystery meat they keep in the freezer,” Richie jokes. “‘It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters!’”

Eddie groans and shoves at Richie, who makes a show of clutching at his arm and crying, “Help, Eddie’s trying to make me into a meat pie! He’s – hah, stop it, you little – he’s  _ tenderizing me!” _

They’re still laughing so hard when Eddie feels the RV slow to a stop that he can hardly hear Bill’s voice through the door and over their own racket. It’s only by a frankly herculean effort that he manages to catch enough of his breath to answer the proceeding knock with a giddy invitation to come on in.

Beverly is the one who accepts it, her grip on the doorknob relaxed enough that Eddie can see another band-aid covering her latest embroidery-needle stab wound. She takes one look at the two of them, pink-cheeked with their heads bowed together, and breaks into a smile bright enough to match the joy Eddie feels.

“Hey, we need you two for a very important vote.”

“I vote against pasta for dinner,” Richie says immediately.

“Seconded.”

Behind her, Patty says, “We found a dog.”

“A dog?” Eddie climbs to his feet reluctantly. “What do you mean, a dog?”

As if in response, he hears an excited yip from the kitchenette.

“Do you think I hurt its feelings talking about what we’re having for dinner?” Richie stage-whispers, already straining to see past the small cluster of people gathered by their door. Despite his own immediate reservations, Eddie feels his heart melt more over the look on Richie’s face than over the admittedly adorable, floppy-eared mutt they find sitting politely beside Mike outside.

“Before you ask,” Stan says, “the vote is on what to name him, not whether we’re keeping him.”

“Max,” Richie volunteers without a moment’s hesitation. 

Eddie raises his hand  _ and  _ his eyebrows, because really, it’s perfect. He’s a little too busy being relieved by the fact that the dog, dirty and thin but clearly beyond thrilled to have found a group of friendly humans, is still wearing a collar to notice that there’s already a name printed on the tag.

“Mr. Chips,” Mike reads for them. “My vote is for that.”

Of course Richie and Eddie are immediately outvoted, not that either of them really minds. Eddie makes them promise to keep Mr. Chips in the truck until they can get him cleaned up, then winds up joining Richie in the cab with him for the remainder of their drive into a town that, as luck would have it, still has running water and a grocery store with approximately zero zombies wandering its aisles. 

They stock up on dog food, canned food, and water, and when they’re forced to outrun and beat back a small group of creatures that are probably meant to look at least a little scarier than they are – well, it’s trouble, but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Justice for Mr. Chips! 
> 
> The "Farmer Vincent" thing is a _Motel Hell_ reference btw! Such a fun little 80s horror movie, I couldn't resist, and Richie would 100% have seen and probably loved it because he, like me, has questionable taste.
> 
> Stay tuned for more upcoming reddie content from me! I plan on jumping right in to doing the [trope bingo](https://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/) challenge for the first time in quite a lot of years. I'm really looking forward to some of the prompts!


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